Central leadership questioned after Cong defeat

POOR SHOWING: Congress' disjointed campaign has raised questions about its central leadership.

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Keywords: S M Krishna, Congress

New Delhi: The Congress headquarters in Bangalore and the Capital wore a deserted look from the early hours of the morning. Perhaps, the party knew what was coming.

Within three hours of the counting, the man who had been sent from Raj Bhavan in Maharashtra to lead the party's Karnataka campaign was conceding defeat.

“As one of the chief campaign managers of the party, I own (up to) the defeat and I would like to congratulate BJP,” said senior Congress leader, S M Krishna.

Krishna himself had been catapulted back into Karnataka just weeks before the election, only adding to the confusion.

While the party claimed that its seats and vote share had increased and accused Deve Gowda of splitting the anti-BJP vote, there were questions over election management with the party losing out in a majority of the reserved constituencies, once the bastion of the Congress.

“Secular vote, which Congress lays claim to, was split in JD(S) and BSP and JD(U). BJP has also not got clear majority – they seem to have improved slightly in certain areas because I think they projected caste, they got identified with a particular community, which Congress will never do at any cost,” said General Secretary, All India Congress Committee, Prithviraj Chavan.

The party's disjointed campaign in Karnataka raised questions about its central leadership.

Sonia Gandhi had aggressively campaigned in Karnataka, while Rahul Gandhi had made the state an important stop on his political road-shows. No one in the party was willing to accept that the Congress high command should shoulder the responsibility of yet another election defeat.

“Obviously we could have done better, we didn’t do as well. But by no stretch of imagination can you call it a reflection on the Central Government, it's clearly all local issues,” declared MP and Congress spokesperson, Jayanthi Natarajan.

This election defeat couldn’t have come at a worse time for the Congress, with general elections also less than a year away.

Not having won a major state election in two years, the party now goes into this winter's elections across North India with an air of defeatism. Clearly, holding strategy meetings in Delhi is one thing, fighting elections in state capitals is quite another.

With inputs from Veeraraghav in Bangalore