Bhubaneswar: Even after a month of the assembly election in Haryana, the Congress is perhaps unable to digest the outcome. It has now threatened the Election Commission of India to drag the poll panel to court for the ‘tone and tenor’ of its letter to the party on its complaint over the results of the recently concluded Haryana Assembly election.
The poll panel had recently snubbed the grand old party for doubting the integrity of the statutory body and virtually cautioned it to desist from making baseless allegations against the panel.
The letter was pretty long and the poll panel’s rebuttal was point by point.
Surprisingly, the Congress party has been making ‘false allegations’ against the poll panel wherever and whenever it received a drubbing in elections. Strangely it does not utter a word when the poll outcome is in its favour. Congress leaders and spokespersons miss no chance to react if any election result is contrary to their taste.
The party credited senior leader Rahul Gandhi for the successes in Telangana, Himachal and Karnataka while promptly looked for some pretext to blame the ECI for Haryana debacle.
According to analysts, the party appears hell bent to give all credit to Rahul Gandhi for the successes and is in no mood to digest the failures or keen on introspection.
This trend has become very critical after the Haryana polls as the party was predicted to oust the BJP government from power due to ‘acute anti-incumbency’. On the day of counting of votes, the mainstream media forecast clean sweep for the party during the initial trends. But as the day progressed, the outcome was totally different. The media in-charge Jairam Ramesh lost no time in writing to the Chief Election Commissioner citing ‘delay in uploading the trends.’
Since then, the party has been targeting the poll panel. Senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is known for his tirade against the poll body. He has also not spared any statutory body including the courts where his party lands almost for everything to seek redressal of grievances. The Enforcement Directorate—probing his alleged money laundering issue in the National Herald case, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) have not been spared by the Gandhi scion also.
Analysts say that the situation is likely to aggravate once the results of the Maharashtra and Jharkhand results are announced. The Congress, as per the current estimates, lags far behind in preparedness to tackle the BJP in the Assembly elections in these two states. Hence the outcome may not be to the taste of the party, they say.
In such a situation, the analysts ask, when will the party begin to digest the poll outcomes or be prepared to accept those as the verdict of the people. Since 2014, Congress has been losing elections, including by-polls, in many states. Though it has been routed in Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal completely in the past elections, it refuses to accept the people’s mandates.
Congress was enthused to a great extent when its tally in the 2024 Lok Sabha election rose to 99 from 44 in 2019 elections. It had prompted the party to behave like the leader of the entire opposition grouping INDIA. But the Haryana drubbing appears to have unnerved it and it is looking for some escape route to shift the blame on others including the poll panel.
It is forgetting that it is not 2014 but 1984 when its downslide has begun though it managed huge mandate in one or two elections post Indira Gandhi or Rajeev Gandhi assassinations. It needs to have a re-look and do course correction it it is ever keen on getting back its old glory.
