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‘Postmortem being done’: Ashok Gehlot reveals what happened at Congress’ Haryana election debrief
The Congress top brass on Thursday held a review meeting on the party's shock defeat in Haryana Assembly polls.
Former Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot on Friday said the Congress leadership has decided to set up a platform for a detailed analysis of what went wrong in Haryana, describing the results as “surprising”.
"Postmortem is being done," Gehlot told ANI. "A meeting was held yesterday where Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge decided that a platform will be set up for all our candidates—both winning and losing—along with state leaders, to delve deep and assess what actually happened."
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Gehlot expressed disbelief over the election outcome, which many thought would favour Congress.
"The entire country was watching that Congress was winning. But what happened suddenly? Surprising results came in," he said, adding that the need to "reach the roots of it" was essential.
Gehlot acknowledged that factors like factionalism, overconfidence, and caste equations might have played a role but stressed that the reasons behind the defeat need to be thoroughly examined before making any definitive comments.
"We have seen a situation for the first time where results get overturned. Nobody can understand how it happened in Haryana. Even BJP leaders were saying that the Congress is winning," he noted.
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Congress held review meeting
On Thursday, the Congress leadership held the review meeting which was attended by party president Mallikarjun Kharge, former party chief Rahul Gandhi, AICC general secretary K.C. Venugopal, senior observers Ashok Gehlot and Ajay Maken, and other senior leaders. Haryana Congress chief Udai Bhan and former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, however, were notably absent from the meeting.
The review session focused on analyzing the "unexpected" results and decided to form a fact-finding team to investigate further, reported PTI quoting sources. The team will speak with all candidates to understand the reasons behind the party’s performance and address complaints of discrepancies in Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) raised by several Congress candidates.
"We held a review meeting on Haryana election results. As you all know, the exit polls and opinion polls had shown a different picture. The results were unexpected," said Ajay Maken after the meeting.
"There was a lot of difference between exit polls and the actual results. We discussed that and will take appropriate steps going forward."
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Asked whether infighting had contributed to the defeat, Maken noted, "There are various reasons, from the Election Commission to internal differences, we have discussed all that will do so in future as well because such a big upset...we cannot discuss everything in one or one-and-a-half hour."
Despite high hopes of dislodging the BJP, which has governed Haryana for a decade, the Congress was able to secure only 37 seats in the 90-member Assembly, falling short of expectations. Pre-election surveys and exit polls had predicted a comfortable Congress victory, but the BJP managed to hold onto power with 48 seats.
