Janjivan Bureau / New Delhi: Terming the win of Mr Ahmed Patel in the Rajya Sabha polls a lesson for the BJP, the Congress today said money, muscle and manipulation could not win in the election.
Reacting to Mr Patel’s win in the RS elections, senior Congress leader and Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad said, ‘The defeat is a lesson for the BJP and they are free to approach any court.
Reacting to the victory of Mr Patel, senior Congress leader and former Finance Minister P Chidambaram said, ‘Money, muscle and manipulation could not win in the Gujarat RS election.
BJP can break a few weak Congress MLAs, but BJP cannot break the Congress party.
Patel, the political secretary to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, betrayed the personal nature of this rivalry when he said: “Shah has a personal grudge against me which is why they are going all out, using the most underhand means that I have ever seen in my 40 years of politics to ensure that I lose. Money power, muscle power, you name it – they have deployed it.”
Shah, on his part, pulled all stops to try and derail Patel’s bid for a fifth term in the Upper House. In the end, ironically, as this report in The Wire points out, it was Shah’s personal involvement in the operation that proved to be the party’s undoing with the EC invalidating the votes of two Congress defectors since they had showed their ballots to the BJP president.
BJP stands exposed of personal vendetta and political terror. People of Gujarat will give them a befitting reply in this year’s election
While Shah made his maiden entry into the house of elders, as did Information and Broadcasting Minister Smriti Irani, it was apparent that the focus was entirely on ensuring Patel’s defeat. The fact that Union ministers Arun Jaitley, Ravi Shankar, Nirmala Sitharaman, MA Naqvi, Piyush Goyal and Dharmendra Pradhan marched down to the Election Commission not once but twice to try and sway the outcome of this one particular seat tells us that the battle carried much more than just its electoral significance.
This election was a trial by fire for the Congress, which has suffered successive electoral defeats – barring the Punjab Assembly election – since 2014. It has been dogged by infighting and has not really treated the electoral battle in Gujarat with due urgency.
“It is surprising that cross-voting by Congress MLAs in the recent presidential elections, an indicator of the party’s poor intelligence network and the high command having little control over its legislators, did not prepare the party for Vaghela’s resignation and its fallout ahead of the Rajya Sabha elections.”
Thus, defeat in this election would have been a blow to the Congress, whereas a win would not be much more than a morale booster.
