The Congress Working Committee will meet on Sunday at 4 pm in Delhi to discuss the party’s complete decimation in the Assembly elections, ANI reported.
The Congress’s huge defeat in the polls has raised uncertainty about the party’s future.
The party managed to win only 55 of the 690 seats spread across the five states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Goa in the results declared on Thursday. It lost Punjab to the Aam Aadmi Party and failed to wrest power from the Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur.
In Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP won with a comfortable majority, the Congress won just two seats in the 403-member state Assembly. With this, the party’s footprint in India has shrunk to just two states – Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. In Maharashtra, the Congress is in a coalition government with the Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party.
After the results on Thursday, Congress veteran leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said that the situation is alarming for the party.
Azad, a part of the group of 23 leaders or G-23, who had written a letter to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi to push for internal reforms in 2020, said that those who worked for the party for years cannot “watch it dying like this”.
The former leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha expressed hope that the Congress leadership would take note of the shortcomings, which the G-23 members have been raising “for quite some time”.
Former Congress President Rahul Gandhi said the party would learn from these election results. “Humbly accept the people’s verdict,” he added.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said that the party workers had worked very hard in Uttar Pradesh to raise people’s problems but could not convert that into votes.
Congress party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said that the party will continue to introspect on the causes of the defeat, and do better in the future.
“We are definitely disappointed but not demoralised,” he said. “We have only lost the elections, not our courage. We are not going anywhere, we will keep fighting until we win. We will reinvent ourselves and come back with a new strategy.”
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