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Misplaced sense of comfort proved Congress’s undoing
As the results came in, and the Congress lost an election it was expected to win, there was a sense of deja vu for party insiders.
About a month ago, when election campaigning in Haryana was at its peak, a Congress leader shocked the party by publicly using foul language against fellow Congress leader Kumari Selja, who belongs to the Dalit community, on camera. The implications of this shocking clip were cataclysmic, as it was immediately seized by the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and circulated widely -- but the Congress reaction was underwhelming. Bhupinder Singh Hooda issued a statement claiming the video was “manipulated” and claimed “no Congress member can say such things”.
As an insider pointed out, any such threat to the party’s unity needed a major intervention — such as Hooda going to Selja’s home and apologising for statements made by his loyalists . The party’s failure to have him do this resulted in Selja staying home and not campaigning for 10 days last month, and even Rahul Gandhi’s belated efforts at brokering a truce so that they could appear united at his rallies failed to have an impact.
Back then, Hooda, other Congress leaders, perhaps even Gandhi may have believed their party was marching to success and that nothing could stop it from returning to power in a state it governed for a decade between 2004 and 2014.
As the results came in on Tuesday, and the party lost an election it was expected to win, there was a sense of deja vu for party insiders.
After all, similar factionalism was one of the factors behind its loss in two elections it was expecte to win in late 2023, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh.
Perhaps, in its confidence in its strength, the party the party had forgotten lessons from Politics 101.
For instance, however strong a regional leader is, there needs to be supervision by representatives who should not have any skin in the game. In Haryana, the AICC member in-charge Dipak Babaria had a limited role while the local Congress chief Uday Bhan, meant to be an alternative power centre, was also a Hooda appointee.
Then, the Congress was so convinced it was winning that it didn’t do even the most basic analysis of what really happened in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. A closer analysis like the one BJP did would have revealed that the party had in fact won some of those five seats with relatively small and therefore precarious margins. “The Congress won Sonepat with a margin of just 22,000 which is not at all good in a Lok Sabha poll,’’ said BJP leader Satish Poonia. “When we analysed the results, we saw that we had actually won in 44 assembly seats. So we knew that we just had tod o the ground work and win.” While the BJP built on this and tried to rally workers together, the Congress failed to gather ground intelligence and harness the strength of its workers in the state. The party failed to notice or rectify the problem of missing district presidents in the state, key leaders who could have given it vital inputs from the ground.
Finally, if the Congress party had worked on its organisation and cadres, it would have paid more attention to real feedback instead of expensive surveys conducted by external agencies. Much like the exit polls, these claimed the party would be comfortably over 50 seats in the state. By the last week of September, BJP leaders were speaking of a turnaround, but by then, the Congress was so busy planning its celebration that it perhaps didn’t notice.
To be sure, the BJP is no stranger to similar hubris, the 2024 general elections being a case in point. Assertions of getting 400 plus seats repeatedly by senior leaders led to a listless campaign by its own workers and loyal voters. In Uttar Pradesh, these utterances led to the opposition successfully raising doubts about the BJP’s motivations for targetting this number
Many in the Congress are, with the benefit of hindsight, also asking if they put in enough effort into Haryana. For instance, if the party won Karnataka, it was because it started working there two years in advance, and the five guarantees it promised were announced well before the state went to polls. In Haryana, the seven guarantees were almost announced almost as an afterthought, just a couple of weeks before the state polled. And they were not very amplified. The party also used Rahul Gandhi sparingly, with him spending just three days campaigning in the state. It’s not immediately clear who planned the star campaigners and their rallies.
Privately, the party admitted to its misplaced sense of comfort ahead of polls, but publicly t it is in denial mode, blaming everyone but itself. “It’s not our over confidence,’’ said party spokesperson Ved Prakash Vidrohi, “It’s the Jat versus non-Jat mobilisation that helped the BJP.”
