Press Trust Of India
New Delhi, Feb 11: A pall of gloom descended on the AICC headquarters, a day after Congress suffered the ignominy of a duck in Delhi elections — the fifth successive debacle of the grand old party in various states across the country.
There was no official word on whether the Congress high command has accepted the resignation of AICC general secretary Ajay Maken who quit taking the moral responsibility for the defeat. Maken, who met party chief Sonia Gandhi Wednesday, has declared that he was taking responsibility as he was the chairman of the party’s campaign committee for Delhi. Apparently to keep the media at bay, the AICC cancelled the briefing scheduled for the day.
Barring senior leaders like AICC treasurer Motilal Vora, hardly any senior leader came to the party headquarters. Party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi, on Twitter, called for a “deep and genuine” introspection to revive the party’s fortunes. He said “After Delhi, our attention now turns to Bihar,” where assembly polls are due by the yearend.
In an apparent dig at the BJP, he said, “The fear of losing, followed by actual defeat is an imp safeguard of democracy over incumbents– in this case BJP–& leads to better governance.”
The humiliating defeat in the national capital is the fifth successive debacle for the Congress since the Lok Sabha elections in May last year. It lost power in Haryana, where it was in power under Bhupinder Singh Hooda government, and Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir, the three states where it shared power in a coalition. In fact, a matter of serious concern for the Congress in the capital is the fact that its vote share has gone down from 24.55 per cent in the 2013 elections to 9.7 per cent. It was around 15 per cent in the Lok Sabha polls.
