One day Indian voter will surprise BJP: Shashi Tharoor

The Indian voter has always been capable of throwing up surprises and the BJP will also get to know about it one day, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said on Sunday.

His remarks came in the backdrop of the party's debacle and drubbing in the just-concluded assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Punjab and Manipur.

The Congress could have done much better in Uttarakhand, and in Goa, "we had very good chances of being the single largest party", Tharoor said at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF).

"But mind you in both the states the number of voters are relatively small, and that perhaps contributed," the MP from Thiruvananthapuram said.

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In the politically crucial Uttar Pradesh, despite a high-pitched campaign led by Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the party could manage to win only two of the 403 assembly seats with the vote share plummeting to a meagre 2.33 per cent and most of its candidates losing security deposits.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra did remarkable and energetic campaigning for the party, and "from my point of view, I don't think that the Congress per se can be faulted because on the grounds of one person's campaigning", Tharoor said.

"I think the issues are rather larger for the party as well as for party viability in some states where our presence has been systematically going down," he said.

On Priyanka Gandhi's campaigning, the MP said, "You would have seen her everywhere, including getting arrested a couple of times by the Uttar Pradesh Police. You have seen her very much on the spot and running through the state."

The 66-year-old leader also expressed surprise over political analysts describing the results as a "foregone conclusion", saying very few predicted BJP's victory until the exit polls came out.

"If it was a foregone conclusion, all the pundits should have been saying that for the last five-six weeks of election campaign. Very few, if any did, it was only when the exit polls were coming out that the tale turned and people said BJP is going to win.

"Until then there was no question in my mind that most of people were expecting a very, very close fight, and some were saying anecdotally that Samajwadi Party was ahead," Tharoor said.

The Indian voter has the capacity to surprise and one day, they will also surprise the BJP. "But right now they have given the BJP what it wanted," he said.

The JLF's 15th edition started here on Thursday and is being held in a hybrid format for the first time since its inception in 2006. It was held virtually from March 5 to 9 because of Covid.

Turkish bestselling novelist Elif Shafak, American writer and 2002 Pulitzer Prize for fiction finalist Jonathan Franzen, South African novelist and 2021 Booker winner Damon Galgut, Australian author and 2003 Booker winner DBC Pierre, English actor-writer Rupert Everett, and eminent Jamaican poet Kei Miller are among the 250 authors participating in the JLF this year.

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