A day after the poor performance of the Congress in the assembly elections in four out of the five states that went to polls this year, party president Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday conceded defeat saying that they got less support than expected.
Despite blaming price rise for the poor show in assembly polls, she ruled out replacing Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister while refraining to comment on who would be the Congress’s PM candidate in 2014.
She further said that the Congress accepted the mandate of the people, adding that every election, despite win or loss, was a lesson for the party.
Talking about the possible reasons of the dismal performance of the party, Sonia said that wrong choice of candidates was one of the reasons for the poor poll results. She also blamed the weak organisation of the Congress for the debacle in Uttar Pradesh.
She further said, “The people of Uttar Pradesh were upset with the BSP and the option before them was Samajwadi Party,” adding that the Congress had too many leaders in the state rather than lack of leadership.
Responding to a question on the literal washout of the Congress from Amethi and Rae Bareli, Sonia said, “We have earlier lost elections in Rae Bareli earlier as well, it is not the first time. It seems that people were not happy with sitting MLA’s. In Amethi, we had a new candidate and he won.”
The Congress president also maintained that the party would sit with its colleagues and figure out what went wrong for the party.
According to Sonia, while in Punjab Manpreet Singh Badal’s PPP damaged the Congress on 23 seats, voters were unhappy with its performance in Goa and “voted against us”. She also accepted that the Congress needed to “pull up its socks and get going for Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh”.
The Congress president, however, asserted that the results would not damage the UPA at the Centre.
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