New Delhi: Rahul Gandhi is taking stock. In Uttar Pradesh, where despite his leading the Congress from the front, the party fared very poorly in the assembly elections. Over the next few days starting today, Mr Gandhi will meet state leaders and others who were involved with electioneering in UP to analyse what went wrong and fix things in time for the Lok Sabha elections in 2014.
In February, immediately after the serious loss of face as elections results showed that the Congress had added but six seats to its tally in the state despite an exhaustive campaign by Mr Gandhi, he had appeared in public to accept responsibility and said that a weak organisational structure in the state had done the party in. "I know I campaigned and led from the front, it is my responsibility...Organisationally we are not where we should be in UP... The fundamentals of the Congress party in UP were weak. Unless we work on those fundamentals, we will remain weak," Mr Gandhi had said candidly.
Seven years of focused work in UP had come to naught and Mr Gandhi has his task cut out. On the top of his UP agenda is meeting Congress candidates who lost, but polled over 20,000 votes. There are almost 160 of those - candidates who could have potentially won. He will also meet his 28 new MLAs in the state, Congress MPs from UP and ministers and people who had zonal charge. Partymen see significance in the fact that Digvijaya Singh, the senior general secretary who had charge of the UP elections, is out of the country and so will not be a part of the UP analysis. The stock-taking was to have been held last week, but was rescheduled to begin today.
Party sources say there is likely to be a fair deal of finger-pointing by Congress leaders. Those who lost say they will bring up critical issues like in-fighting among top leaders and the heartburn in party cadres about candidate selection and "outsiders" being given ticket. Then there controversial statements made by senior ministers like Salman Khurshid, Beni Prasad Verma and others which could have damaged party prospects.
The poor organisation structure of the Congress in the state, which both Mr Gandhi and his mother and party president Sonia Gandhi have said was a major reason for the Congress UP debacle, begs immediate fixing and Mr Gandhi is expected to begin addressing that post-haste as he analyses UP.
Rahul Gandhi had pulled out all stops in UP this time. Building on the hope handed out by a very good showing in the Lok Sabha elections in 2009, when the Congress got 22 of UP's 80 Parliamentary seats, Mr Gandhi had led a much-hyped, star-studded Congress campaign armed with what the party believed was a winning strategy. It failed to stir the people of UP, who were drawn more to the fresh appeal of another young leader Akhilesh Yadav. His Samajwadi Party posted a spectacular win and the 38-year-old is now the youngest Chief Minister of the state.
In his first post-election analysis, Rahul Gandhi had admitted, "Generally there was a mood for SP, which is very apparent."
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