Rahul Gandhi’s Amethi defeat: SP-BSP didn’t cooperate, Congress panel told
The SP and BSP which had formed an alliance to fight the Lok Sabha polls did not field any candidate in Amethi. The Congress panel that comprises senior party leaders Zubair Khan and KL Sharma started holding assembly segment-wise consultations on Friday.
The two-member Congress committee, tasked with ascertaining the reasons for Rahul Gandhi’s defeat in Amethi, has been informed that the local Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party units had “failed” to cooperate in ensuring the Congress chief’s victory, a senior leader said on the condition of anonymity Friday.
Amethi Congress leaders have cited the arithmetic of votes to make their point that while the SP-BSP alliance did not field a candidate in the constituency to help Congress (Ajay Aggarwal/HT PHOTO)
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The SP and BSP which had formed an alliance to fight the Lok Sabha polls did not field any candidate in Amethi. The Congress panel that comprises senior party leaders Zubair Khan and KL Sharma started holding assembly segment-wise consultations on Friday.
Khan is AICC secretary and an aide of Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, while Sharma is UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi’s representative in Rae Bareli and has worked closely in Amethi too. Rahul Gandhi contested from two seats — Amethi in Uttar Pradesh and Wayanad in Kerala — in the Lok Sabha polls. While he was defeated by Smriti Irani in Amethi, he won the Wayanad seat by a record margin of over 4 lakh votes.
Amethi Congress leaders have cited the arithmetic of votes to make their point that while the SP-BSP alliance did not field a candidate in the constituency to help Congress, local units of these parties did not extend the desired cooperation for Gandhi’s victory.
Umesh Raghuvanshi is an award-winning journalist with nearly four decades of demonstrated experience in the profession. He is the author of Ayodhya: The Gods Are Liberated. He is skilled in storytelling and newswriting, and writes on politics, governance, legislature, finance, environment, and social issues. He is based in Lucknow, is well-travelled, and has covered several national and international events, as well as all assembly and parliament elections in Uttar Pradesh since 1984. He has been a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley, USA, and a Metcalf Fellow at the Metcalf Institute of Marine and Environmental Reporting, University of Rhode Island, USA. He is a science graduate from DBS College, Dehradun, and holds an MA in Political Science from DAV (PG) College, Dehradun. He won the KC Kulish International Merit Award for excellence in journalism (2015) and received it in New Delhi in 2017. He also won a competition organised by the United Nations Environment Programme DTIE OzonAction Programme in 2009 that assessed coverage of the interlinkages between ozone and climate change. He was awarded in Beijing, China, in 2010. He started his career with a Dehradun-based English daily in the early 1980s and later worked with The Pioneer too.
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