People have voted for change, says Congress

Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi said people have voted for “change” in Haryana and Maharashtra as Congress lost power in both with the Bharatiya Janata Party making deep inroads in the two states.

“We accept the verdict of the people. People have voted for change, after 15 years of our government in Maharashtra and 10 years in Haryana,” Gandhi said as the results came in on Sunday of the assembly polls.

However, unfazed by the rout, Gandhi said that Congress will work hard to regain the confidence of the people even as he congratulated the BJP for its victory. “I congratulate the BJP on their success. The Congress party will work hard on the ground to once again earn the confidence of the people,” Gandhi said in a statement.

Congress’s general secretary in-charge for Haryana, Shakeel Ahmed, meanwhile said that the party will sit and analyse the causes behind its “below-expected performance”. He said that it was the people’s verdict which was final in a democracy.

“Haryana has a tradition of change, of changing the government in every election. The only exception since its formation in 1966 was in the last polls, when Congress chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda retained power in 2009,” he said.

Taking the responsibility for Congress’s defeat in Maharashtra, former chief minister Prithviraj Chavan said that although the party’s performance was “disappointing”, it has recovered some of the ground which it had lost in the Lok Sabha polls.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi said the party will now play a “constructive and vigilant role” in the two states where the people have voted for "change" after 15 and 10 years.

“The Congress party accepts the election verdict delivered by the people of Maharashtra and Haryana with humility and resolves to play a constructive and vigilant role. The people of Maharasthra and Haryana trusted us with their mandate thrice and twice respectively. We hope that parties forming the government will fulfill the promises that they made,” Sonia Gandhi said in a statement.

She also thanked the supporters and voters of Congress for having stood by the party and the workers in particular for their “tireless and unstinting commitment” to the party and its ideology.