oppn parties Congress & BSP: It Would Have Made No Difference

News Snippets

  • SP drops two candidates owing allegiance to Azam Khan from Rampur and Moradabad
  • In Assam, a controversy erupted after a picture of UPPL leader Benjamin Basumatary, lying on a stack of Rs 500 notes circulated on social media. UPPL is an ally of the BJP
  • AAP's Jalandhar-West MP Sushil Kumar Rinku joins the BJP. He was the only AAP Lok Sabha MP
  • Supreme Court dismisses Centre's plea to review its 2023 verdict in the PMLA case
  • Close save for passengers as they remain unhurt after the wings of two planes graze at Kolkata airport. Pilots derostered and inquiry ordered by DGCA
  • Bengal BJP leader Dilip Ghosh gets notice from the EC as well as the BJP for making ugly remarks about Mamata Banerjee's parentage
  • Sadanand Vasanth Date, who faught terrorists in the 26/11 attack and was awarded the Preisent's Police medal, has been appointed the head of the NIA
  • Centre will borrow Rs 7.5L cr in the first six months of FY25, nearly 50% of the target for the full year
  • 25 stocks, including SBI, will see same day trade settlements from today in the world's fastest settlement mode in both BSE and NSE
  • Stocks recover smartly on Wednesday: Sensex rises 526 points to 72996 and Nifty 118 points to 22123
  • Tennis: Rohan Bopanna-Matthew Ebden reached the semifinals of the Miami Open
  • IPL: records tumble as SRH beat MI in a high-scoring match. SRH score 277/3 with 18 sixes and Mumbai score 246 with 20 sixes to fall short by 31 runs. Atotal of 38 sixes, highest in an IPL match were hit and both teams combined to score 523 runs, the highest aggregate in an IPL match
  • Amul will launch fresh milk in the US
  • IPL: RCB beat Punjab by 4 wickets as Kohli and Karthik shine with the bat
  • India strongly objected to German foreign office remarks over the arrest of delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, called it "biased assumptions"
Delhi Lt Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena says government cannot be run from jail, hints at President's Rule in the capital ////// In a dangerous incident, the wings of two planes grazed while taxiing on the runway at Kolkata airport, all passengers were safe but DGCA ordered an inquiry and the pilots were derostered
oppn parties
Congress & BSP: It Would Have Made No Difference

By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2022-04-10 15:08:42

About the Author

Sunil Garodia Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator.

After a crushing and demoralizing defeat in the UP elections when the Congress party could win just 2 seats, got only 2.5% votes and 97 percent of its 403 candidates lost their security deposits, it is funny that Rahul Gandhi is taking potshots at the Bahujan Samaj party (BSP) and Mayawati. Rahul claimed that the Congress had offered to make Mayawati the chief ministerial face if she had contested the elections in alliance with the Congress, but she never replied and did not meets Congress leaders.

Does Mr Gandhi realize the reason for the snub? The Congress is a spent force in UP. It was already down in the dumps and after the 2022 elections, it has been totally marginalized. Mayawati is a shrewd politician. She knew that the Congress had lost the Muslim voters long time back to the SP and the BSP. Its Dalit voters had also shifted camp ages back to the two parties as per their caste loyalties, before the BJP cut in through its social engineering from 2014 onwards and made it a three-way drain on the Congress. Except for some old-timers, no one votes for the Congress in UP. Hence, Mayawati knew there was no point in allying with the party and snubbed its overtures.

As Mayawati said later, the Congress had never been well disposed towards her party and had always tried to defame the party. She said even now the Congress was saying that she had refused an alliance and was low key during the UP elections as she was afraid of the numerous cases filed by the Centre against her through agencies like the Enforcement Directorate, the CBI and others. But Mayawati said that she had won most of these cases in the Supreme Court. She advised the Congress to set its house in order instead of raising such issues.

The Congress should follow Mayawati's advice. It should set its house in order. The way the last elections played out, it seems that UP will increasingly have bipolar elections where the BJP and the SP will contest against each other by having a rainbow alliance with smaller parties. It will be an uphill task for the Congress, or for that matter even the BSP, to make a meaningful comeback if the SP does not lose steam. But there is hope for the Congress in Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. It must get to work otherwise there too the Aam Aadmi Party will elbow it out, like it did in Punjab. It will have to realize that no political strategist or fancy campaign will help it win unless it presents itself as a credible alternative with a strong regional leader.