Ashok Chavan heads group to look into Congress reverses in assembly polls, to submit report in two weeks
May 11, 2021
New Delhi [India], May 11 : Congress on Tuesday constituted a group under the chairmanship of party leader and former Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan to evaluate results of recently concluded assembly elections which saw the party getting defeated in Kerala, Assam and Puducherry and failing to open its account in West Bengal.
The other members are former union ministers Salman Khurshid, Manish Tewari and Vincent H Pala and party MP Jothi Mani.
"Congress President has constituted a group to evaluate the results of the recently concluded assembly elections with immediate effect. The group will submit report within two weeks," a party release said.
The announcement came a day after meeting of Congress Working Committee in which Congress President Sonia Gandhi had said that there is need to take "note of our serious setbacks" and to "candidly understand" why the party failed to dislodge incumbent governments in Kerala and Assam and drew a complete blank in West Bengal.
She had announced her intention to set up the group and said results tell that "we need to put our house in order".
"We have to take note of our serious setbacks. To say that we are deeply disappointed is to make an understatement. I intend to set up a small group to look at every aspect that caused such reverses and report back very quickly. We need to candidly understand why in Kerala and Assam we failed to dislodge the incumbent governments, and why in West Bengal we drew a complete blank. These will yield uncomfortable lessons, but if we do not face up to the reality, if we do not look the facts in the face, we will not draw the right lessons", she said.
During the meeting, she had asked general secretaries - Jitender Singh for Assam, Tariq Anwar for Kerala, in charge Dinesh Gundurao for Tamil Nadu and Puducherry and Jitin Prasada for West Bengal to make their presentations.
"I expect them to brief us very frankly on our performance in their respective states. We want them to tell us why we performed well below expectation. These results tell us clearly that we need to put our house in order," she had said.
While the Congress failed to dislodge incumbent governments in Assam and Kerala, it also did not do well in Puducherry and won only two seats though it was leading the government in the Union Territory two months back. Only in Tamil Nadu, where it rode on populartiy of its bigger ally DMK, did the party perform credibly.
The CWC also decided to temporarily defer organizational elections for electing a new party chief in the wake of "emergent conditions prevailing on account of unprecedented coronavirus pandemic".
