How Maharashtra failed Rahul Gandhi

Mumbai: The victory of the Mahayuti in the Assembly polls has yet again put focus on Congress leader Rahul Gandhi and a question mark on his inability to read the pulse and issues related to the state and its voters.

The fact that the Congress party has faced a humiliating defeat in the very same state it was founded a 138 years ago – on December 28, 1885 – brings forth the fact that both the Gandhi family and its top leadership within the party are either being too complacent or have lost the plot.

Over the last few years, the state has been under constant flux of change. Apart from the shift in the traditional vote banks of the party, there has also been a decline in the identification and nurturing of leadership at ground level. The candidate list of the Congress party had some names which where both unfamiliar with the local voters and party members. Many candidates who were given tickets did not even have a basic party membership.

The Congress manifesto which the party unveiled towards the end of the election code of conduct was hurriedly put together devoid of any thought and nothing but a duplication of the schemes already announced by the Mahayuti.

Added to that every election has its own first-time voters and the fact that Rahul Gandhi or his associates made no attempt to reach out to them said a lot about his interest in converting them into a long-term Congress voters like other parties do.

A senior Congress leader observes that there were several factors that led to the loss of the party in the state, the foremost being the internal camps within the party followed by the fact that the Congress could not distribute tickets to its candidates on time due to which none of the candidates could campaign.

“The third and fourth list of candidate came towards the end of the deadline to file the nominations due to which a large number of candidates did not even have the much required time to plan and fight the polls in their constituencies,” he says adding that unlike PM Modi who was seen holding rallies every other day in every assembly in the state, Rahul did not attend to many rallies.

“He came once to Vidharbha, Nagpur and Mumbai. The BJP who had instructed all of their CMs from other states to come and campaign for their candidates for the whole duration. During election time people tend to notice all of this – you need to be visible not only to your voters but also on social media, all of this counts which unfortunately Rahul did not do,” the leader observes.

Another senior Congressman on condition of anonymity points out that its as not much about Maharashtra failing Rahul Gandhi as much it is about the leadership.

The focus of the Congress leadership was who would be the chief minister rather than how the party should win. Another important issue was Shiv Sena (UBT) overestimated its performance while Congress underestimated it without having a fair and studied reality check. The tendency of the Congress to outsource its entire decision making process from selection of candidates to selection of seats to only MLAs is erroneous and foolish. Because these MLAs only have one criteria in their minds, how to ensure their own survival! That’s why several seats which the Congress could have done well on were given to the Sena.

Gandhi’s trust in people disconnected from the state too is the reason for the party’s dismal performance. Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge is the most experienced outsider on Maharashtra. The appointments of elitist Jairam Ramesh and bureaucratic Pawan Khera was a bad combination during election campaigns, especially in taking up the BJP while the latter is in the government. “We must remember, that during the UPA rule, the BJP always deployed politicians with mass appeal like Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj to always put the UPA on the backfoot,” the leader pointed.