Headlines
Despondent Congress fears debacle in Delhi
New Delhi, Feb 5
Squeezed between an
aggressive BJP and a resurgent AAP, the Congress is dreading the
prospect of finishing a distant third yet again in Delhi.
While
no one in the Congress is even dreaming of a victory in the Saturday
assembly election, the best hope among its leaders is to avoid a rout -
while the brightest is to retain the eight seats it won last time.
For
the country's grand old party, another hung assembly a la December 2013
will help it again become the kingmaker. That is when it propped up
AAP's Arvind Kejriwal to power.
It is a sad story for a party that ruled Delhi for 15 long years from 1998 with a near consistent 40 percent vote share.
The
Congress vote share plunged to 24.5 percent in 2013. Most of its
traditional vote banks have shifted to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).
The
campaigning in Delhi was a clear indicator that the party still doesn't
have a roadmap for revival after the disastrous performance in the 2014
Lok Sabha election.
It largely stuck to its traditional method
of campaigning even as the BJP and the AAP were more organised,
media-savvy and aggressive. Unlike the BJP and the AAP, the Congress had
no volunteers from outside Delhi.
Congress president Sonia
Gandhi and vice president Rahul Gandhi addressed fewer rallies than
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and far fewer than Kejriwal.
Congress
sources admit it is focussing all its energy only on those seats --
Delhi has 70 -- where it can put up a credible show. But they insist the
party won't prop up the BJP or the AAP in the event of a hung verdict.
The Congress is battling internal problems too in Delhi.
Party
leaders admit they are financially crunched vis-a-vis its two main
rivals. They also complain that the media was not giving adequate space
to them.
The party ensured that Rahul Gandhi's rallies and road
shows were not damp squib. They were held in densely populated,
low-income areas.
"People in these areas were traditional Congress supporters but we are losing them to the AAP," a party functionary told IANS.
After
finishing third in most assembly seats in 2013, the Congress also
finished third in six of the seven parliamentary seats last year. It
stood fourth in the seventh Lok Sabha seat.
The Congress sought
to energize its current campaign by projecting former union minister
Ajay Maken. But there is a feeling that he should have been propped up
earlier.
But Maken's elevation angered state unit president Arvinder Singh Lovely, who declined to contest the election.
Party workers today blame the Sheila Dikshit government for the huge erosion in Congress support in the capital.
"Why
could it not reduce the power tariff? Had she done it, it would not
have allowed the AAP to get an election issue," one leader said.
Many in the Congress hope that Delhi will have another hung assembly.
"There
is an undercurrent in our favour. The results will be surprising,"
Kuljit S. Nagra, a Congress leader in Delhi, told IANS.