Lok Sabha Election 2024: Congress to examine booth-wise votes to find out what went wrong in states where it did not win

KC Venugopal has said that the party’s central war room is collecting booth-wise votes from across the country and preparing an analysis that would help the party to understand what went wrong in Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Telangana.

New Delhi: Congress on Wednesday announced six fact-finding committees to analyse what went wrong in eight states, including Karnataka, in Lok Sabha elections where voters “traditionally favoured” the party and where it won Assembly elections in recent times.

Party chief Mallikarjun Kharge constituted the committees, days after he told a Congress Working Committee that panels of senior leaders will be formed to find out what went wrong in states like Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi, Telangana and Haryana among others.

Madhusudan Mistry, Gourav Gogoi and Hibi Eden have been tasked to assess the performance in Karnataka where Congress won only nine out of 28 seats though it had managed to return to power in May last year with a thumping 136 seats.

Sources said the Karnataka panel will look into whether candidate selection, in which 16 candidates were from political families, impacted results and how the guarantee scheme worked electorally. It will interact with state leaders.

Madhya Pradesh, where the Congress did not win a single seat out of 29, will see Prithviraj Chavan, Saptagiri Ulaka and Jignesh Mevani looking into what went wrong while in Chhattisgarh where it won just one out of 11 seats will have veteran leaders Veerappa Moily and Harish Chaudhary investigating the reasons for the poor performance.

Congress Treasurer Ajay Maken and senior MP Tariq Anwar have been assigned to examine Odisha, where it won just one of 21 seats, while former Union Minister PJ Kurien, Assam MP Rakibul Hussain and Punjab leader Pargat Singh will examine what went wrong in Telangana, where it won eight seats.

For Delhi, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, a two member committee of PL Punia and Rajani Patil will do the investigation.

In these eight states, including in MP, Himachal, Delhi and Uttarakhand where it could not open its account, Congress had expected to perform better but did not “in the midst of overall revival and rejuvenation" for the party”.

The CWC resolution on June 8 had said it would be “failing in its duty if it did not take note of the disappointing performance” in some states and “urgent steps” should and will be taken to “address the shortcomings” in the states where the party had “every reason to hope for a better result but where that expectation was not fulfilled”.

Kharge had told the CWC, “while we celebrate the revival, we should pause a little as in some states we have not performed to our abilities and expectations. Further, we could not repeat our performance in states where we had previously done well in the Assembly elections and formed the government.”

Lok Sabha Election 2024 results | Check all constituency results here

Odisha Assembly poll 2024 results| Check constituency results here

Andhra Pradesh Assembly poll 2024 results | Check constituency results here

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