How a resurgent Congress is gearing up for assembly polls in key states

With the Lok Sabha poll giving its electoral revival a fillip, the Congress is now cautiously optimistic of building on its gains in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Haryana; all states due for assembly polls later this year.

Earlier this week, the Congress high command met party leaders from the three states separately for a preliminary round of discussions to assess the Lok Sabha poll results and strategise for the ensuing assembly elections.

Sources privy to the discussions told The Federal that the meetings saw plenty of plain speak by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and party leader Rahul Gandhi over intense factional feuds in each of the three state units. Overzealous leaders from Jharkhand and Maharashtra who urged the central leadership that the party must seek a greater share of seats in the alliance talks with the INDIA bloc partners in the two states were told “in clear terms” that the Congress would “do nothing to destabilise the existing alliance”, sources said.

Mixed bag in LS polls

The Congress’ Lok Sabha performance in the three states was a mixed bag of hits and misses. With the combined strength of its allies and some excellent candidates, the Congress won 13 of the 17 seats it contested in Maharashtra (the highest among all six major parties in the fray) while its Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) partners, Uddhav Thackeray’s Shiv Sena (UBT) and Sharad Pawar’s NCP (SP) won nine and eight seats, respectively. Vishal Patil, who won as an independent candidate from Sangli, has also returned to the Congress’ fold after the Lok Sabha poll results.

In Haryana, the Congress secured over 47% vote share – its highest across all states – and bagged five of the state’s 10 seats, with the remaining seats, including Kurukshetra, which the Congress had left for the AAP as part of a seat-sharing deal, going to the BJP. In Jharkhand, however, despite a seemingly formidable alliance with Hemant Soren’s JMM, the Congress could secure victories in just two of the seven seats it contested while its ally won three seats. The BJP emerged victorious in eight constituencies.

As the Congress prepares for the assembly poll battles due in these states, it now has to contend with a gamut of challenges that range from the party’s traditional bane of keeping its warring state-level leaders united; ensuring that existing alliances continue to work with cohesion and, most importantly, to outfox a jilted BJP (and its allies in Maharashtra) in poll strategy.

Cautioned against complacency

Dealt a severe blow by the electorate in Maharashtra, the state’s Mahayuti government of the BJP, Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena and Ajit Pawar-led NCP, have already begun efforts to recoup; clear signs of which were seen in the massively populist state budget presented by Ajit Pawar on Friday (June 28) that was high on cash doles and schemes for women, youth, farmers and other groups.

A senior Congress leader who was present at the review meetings of all three states told The Federal that though the Lok Sabha polls portend a “definite resurgence” of the party in Haryana and Maharashtra, the high command cautioned state leaders against “complacency” and stressed on the “need for a united fight”.

The leader added that Rahul was uncharacteristically vocal at the meetings and is learnt to have told Ramesh Chennithala, the Congress’ in-charge of Maharashtra, to “make an example of anyone who breaks party discipline”. Likewise, Rahul told his colleagues from Haryana that they must “stop running to the media” with their complaints and instead raise their concerns within the party or else the party will be “forced to take action” against them.

Split wide open in Haryana

In Haryana, the Congress is virtually split down the middle into one camp led by former two-term CM Bhupinder Singh Hooda and the other including the remaining prominent leaders – Sirsa MP Kumari Selja, Rajya Sabha MP Randeep Surjewala, former Union minister Birender Singh and former six-term MLA Ajay Singh Yadav.

That the going won’t be easy for the Congress in the state despite a strong performance in the Lok Sabha polls was evident soon after the June 4 results when its senior leader and Tosham MLA Kiran Chaudhary, a known Hooda baiter, switched to the BJP. Though Chaudhary’s exit had been imminent for months, her move to the BJP has laid bare afresh the internal turmoil in Haryana Congress. Selja and Surjewala nearly justified the defection of Chaudhary, a Jat leader and daughter-in-law of late Congress stalwart Bansi Lal, by echoing the Tosham MLA’s views that the party had become “hostage to the whims of one man”.

Selja even went a step further to claim that the party could have won at least eight of the state’s 10 Lok Sabha seats had it not succumbed to the pressure from “a leader” (read Bhupinder Hooda) into denying Chaudhary’s daughter and former MP Shruti Chaudhary and “some other senior leaders” tickets. Following the Haryana review meetings, while Selja told The Federal that her party was “poised for a thumping victory” in the assembly polls, she also stressed that candidate selection and the overall campaign has to be executed “keeping views of all senior leaders and party workers in mind or else we will hand the state back to the BJP”.

Internal feud in state units

This internal turbulence is not limited to the Congress’ Haryana unit. Sources said that the similar feuds between state leaders rocked the Maharashtra and Jharkhand review meetings too.

Sources told The Federal that when a senior party office bearer from Maharashtra assured Kharge that the Congress will put up a united fight, the Congress president snapped back saying, “I have been juggling delegations of party leaders who either want the current state leadership replaced or retained... one delegation says replace Varsha Gaikwad (the Mumbai Congress chief and now a Lok Sabha MP) and then another says don’t remove her; then one group comes and says remove Nana Patole (the Maharashtra Congress chief) while another says don’t remove... how are you saying the party is united”.

Worrying signs in Jharkhand

In Jharkhand, where the Congress registered its worse show among the three assembly poll-bound states, the only demand on which all senior leaders seemed united on was for the removal of Rajesh Thakur as the party’s state chief. A party office-bearer from Jharkhand said that at least four of the Congress’s seven Lok Sabha candidates complained to the party high command that Thakur was of “no help” to the party in the Lok Sabha campaign and lacked both political heft and organisational skills.

Another senior Jharkhand Congress leader is learnt to have told Kharge that if the Lok Sabha trend continues into the assembly polls, the party’s coalition government with the JMM and the RJD was set for a rout in the 81-member Jharkhand assembly. This leader said an assembly constituency wise mapping of the Lok Sabha results showed that the JMM and the Congress led on only 14 and 15 assembly segments, respectively, across the state, while the BJP took a lead in 46 assembly segments.

What has alarmed the Congress high command particularly with regard to Jharkhand is that unlike Haryana and Maharashtra, where the party and its allies were able to draw support from all major communities, the Lok Sabha results in the eastern state saw the BJP sweeping all general category seats. The five Lok Sabha seats won by the Congress (Khunti and Lohardaga) and the JMM (Dumka, Singhbhum and Rajmahal) are all ST reserved seats.

Major gains on tribal seats

The Congress high command, sources said, was of the view that the Congress and JMM gained in the tribal seats largely because of the public sympathy for Hemant Soren, who was in jail throughout the polls, and the emotive campaign led by Hemant’s wife, Kalpana Soren (now the MLA from Gandey in Kodarma) and Chief Minister Champai Soren.

“The result shows that while the JMM was successful in keeping the tribal votes with our alliance, the Congress failed to mobilise voters of other castes, including the backward castes. With Soren now out on bail, we are confident that the tribal votes will further consolidate in our alliance’s favour because the community knows it was the BJP that unfairly targeted Soren for political vendetta. At the same time, if the tribal-non tribal polarisation is as sharp as the Lok Sabha results suggest, we have a major problem at hand... not only have we lost all general category seats but we have lost them with massive margins,” a former Jharkhand Congress MP told The Federal.

The MP added, “The only solace we can give ourselves right now is that Jharkhand doesn’t always follow the Lok Sabha voting trend in the assembly polls, as was clear in 2019 too, when our alliance won only two seats in the Lok Sabha but romped to power in the state later that year.”

Public outreach strategy

Sources said the Congress high command has instructed leaders of the three states to draw out public outreach strategies at the earliest and told them that the process of shortlisting candidates will begin soon and that the process of seat-sharing negotiations with allies will continue simultaneously.

In Jharkhand, party in-charge Ghulam Ahmed Mir said, the Congress wants to contest on 33 assembly segments - marginally up from the 31 it contested in 2019. In Maharashtra, with a strong showing in the Lok Sabha polls, the Congress is likely to ask for a lion’s share of the state’s 288 assembly seats from allies Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar even though the high command is, for now, “open to the idea of having Uddhav lead the alliance’s campaign (as de facto CM face) owing to the feedback that there is still immense public sympathy for him”, sources said.

No alliance in Haryana

In Haryana, sources said, nearly all state leaders are of the view that the party needn’t strike any alliance for the 90 assembly seats as the BJP is on an electoral tailspin while the other regional outfits, Om Prakash Chautala’s INLD and Dushyant Chautala’s JJP, have both lost much of their political clout.

Hooda, said sources, is also opposed to any understanding with the JJP for the upcoming Rajya Sabha bypoll in the state that has been necessitated by Deepender Hooda’s election to the Lok Sabha. The JJP, which has 10 MLAs in the Haryana assembly, and can, together with the independent MLAs, swing the Rajya Sabha bypoll in the Congress’s favour, has made an open offer of support to the Congress with Dushyant urging Hooda to “field a consensus candidate” against whoever the BJP nominates for the election.

What may, however, cause some complications for the Congress, particularly in Maharashtra and Haryana, is the distinct possibility of Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav demanding a share of seats for his party from the Congress in both these states. Sources in the SP, which bagged 37 Lok Sabha seats in UP and also propelled the Congress’s win on six other seats of the state, said Akhilesh wants the Grand Old Party to be “accommodating” of his party in the alliance talks for Maharashtra and Haryana. SP’s Maharashtra leader and MLA Abu Asim Azmi has already declared that the MVA must give the SP “at least 10 seats” in the state or else “we will have no option but to go solo and field our candidates”.