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| Are Sonia, Rahul & Priyanka down and out? | | UP POLLS | |
RUSTAM
JAMMU, Mar 4: Assembly elections in five state, including Uttar Pradesh (UP), Punjab, Uttrakhand, Goa and Manipur, are over. Results will be out on Tuesday. In the meantime, all the various post-poll surveys have indicated that the UP electorate has rejected outright the Congress of Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Robert Vadra. Robert Vadra is son-in-law of Sonia Gandhi. In other words, the UP electorate has rejected not one family but two families, family of Sonia Gandhi and family of Robert Vadra. These two families had staked everything in order to win UP.
What did the post-poll surveys give to the Congress? The Headlines Today gave 38-42 seats to the Congress and its ally Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) in a House of 403; India TV channel gave 39-55 to the Congress and its ally; the Star News gave 70 seats to the Congress and its pre-poll ally; and News 24 gave 55 seats to the Congress and its ally. The IBN 7 post-poll survey also suggested that the UP electorate rejected out-of-hand the Congress party. In 2007, the Congress had won 22 seats and the RLD 12. As per the post polls survey by CNN-IBN, only 8 per cent voters preferred Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi as CM.
If what the post-poll surveys have suggested is correct, then it can be very safely interpreted as a comprehensive defeat of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi and Robert Vadra and his family; it can be said that the Congress in the country is not only down but also out. It needs to be underlined that Rahul campaigned in the state for almost two years. He crisscrossed the state, held more than 200 election meetings and organised road shows. In fact, he did all that he could to win over the UP voters. He promised moon to the electorate. He ridiculed and virtually abused all the non-Congress parties in the state hoping his no-holds-barred propaganda campaign against these formations would help him capture UP and establish his leadership at national level.
His sister Priyanka Gandhi camped in Rae Bareli and Amethi for almost 30 days. She not only actively campaigned in the assembly constituencies in these two districts, pocket borrows of Gandhi family, and organised a number of road shows there but also campaigned for the party in several other constituencies and it happened for the first time. She demanded votes in the name of Rahul and the dynasty to which he belongs. She even launched her two small kids in the elections, compared their lifestyle with the poor children of UP and held the non-Congress parties responsible for their miserable plight. In other words, she sought to give an emotional orientation to her campaign. There were reports that she ensured the presence of her two children in the elections rallies she could not attend.
Sonia Gandhi also campaigned in her own Lok Sabha constituency and a few other assembly constituencies and painted all the non-Congress parties black, anti-poor, corrupt and bunch of criminals. She, like her son and daughter, did not spare the SP and the BSP, which have been supporting the Congress-led UPA Government from outside. In fact, she used all kinds of invectives or strong words against the SP, the BSP and the BJP leadership with a view to influencing the voting pattern. Robert Vadra also campaigned for a few days. He said he had come to the state to strengthen the hands of Rahul Gandhi saying "right now it is Rahul's time, Priyanka's turn would also come at an appropriate time and he himself would take the plunge if the people of UP so like".
This clearly shows that both the Sonia Gandhi and Robert Vadra families put in their all to capture UP. Not only this, a number of Union Ministers, including Salman Khurshid, Beni Prasad Verma, Sri Prakash Jaiswal, and a number of senior party functionaries, including uncouth Digvijay Singh, vitiated the whole election scene by giving it a communal orientation. Their target was the Muslim votes. So much so that these three senior ministers took cudgels with the Election Commission in their desperate bid to capture Muslim votes and brighten their poll prospectus.
The moral of the story is that the arrogant Congress party flouted the model code of conduct to influence the UP electorate, but came out of the exercise minus everything. This writer is not at all surprised over what the post-poll surveys gave to the Congress party. It was destined to bite dust and it did bite. Of course, this writer agrees that these are just post-poll surveys and not the actual election results. But, still, I tend to believe that the actual elections results would be no different from what the post-poll surveys predicted. |
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