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Congress panel on UP, Bihar debacle to hand in revival package on April 15

The high-level committee set up by Congress president Sonia Gandhi to suggest ways to rejuvenate the party in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, will submit an action plan to her on April 15.

Disclosing this to newspersons in Amethi, former Congress general secretary and coordinator of the high level committee, Sushil Kumar Shinde, said the committee visited the Amethi, Lucknow, Pratapgarh, Phulpur and Rae Bareli Lok Sabha constituencies, and met party workers there to obtain first-hand information about why the Congress was defeated in the last Lok Sabha election and why the party was losing ground. Similar meetings were also held in Patna over the weekend.

Shinde said the party workers mainly blamed organisational weaknesses for the decline of the party in UP. But they also felt that caste polarisation was a strong reason for the loss of votes, he added. Denial of adequate tickets to minorities, Dalits and backwards was also responsible for erosion in the party's base, according to the workers.

Shinde said party workers also blamed the politics of alliance for the present state of the Congress.

He said the Congress had fared better in Bihar, but he refused to admit that this was due to its alliance with the Rashtriya Janata Dal. He said the Congress had adjustments with the RJD for only two seats, and pointed out that the party performed comparatively well in Chhota Nagpur where it contested on its own.

He said in UP, misuse of government machinery in favour of the Bharatiya Janata Party led to the defeat of Congress candidates in more than a dozen Lok Sabha constituencies, including Amethi.

Earlier, addressing Congress workers in Amethi, Shinde said the party had started losing base even before the shilanyas at Ayodhya and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Keeping this in view, the workers should work to revive the party, he said.

"We should learn from the mistakes of the past, accept the social changes and try to give all sections of society their due place in the party organisation," he said, and asked the party workers to ponder over why the party failed to encash on the work it had done for the uplift of Dalits and backwards.

UNI

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