Antony introspect​ion committee now hold daily meetings

June 22, 2014 07:44 pm | Updated November 17, 2021 04:41 am IST - New Delhi

Former Defence Minister and Congress leader A.K. Antony. File photo

Former Defence Minister and Congress leader A.K. Antony. File photo

A day after it kicked off the process of a post-mortem of the Congress debacle in the recent general elections by meeting key Delhi leaders, including the party’s Lok Sabha candidates, the ‘informal’ A.K. Antony Committee worked through Sunday interviewing senior members of the state units of Chattisgarh, Jharkhand and Odisha.

The method used as in the case of Delhi, was that the four member Antony Committee -- that includes Mukul Wasnik, Avinash Pande and R.C. Khuntia -- met each leader separately, posing questions on “what went wrong”, “why they lost” (in the case of losing candidates) and “what should be done to put things right”. The session was not interactive: each interviewee was given a full hearing. In the case of Odisha, the state assembly elections also came in for discussion, as the Congress has been out of power in the state since 2000.

The Antony Committee will meet leaders from Assam on Monday and from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana on Tuesday. Assam, of course, is a state that is on the brink of a possible change of chief minister, with Congress Leader in the Lok Sabha Mallikarjuna Kharge likely to travel to the state this week to meet MLAs to assess the mood and numbers before a final decision is taken.

As for Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, this will be the first meeting with state leaders after the division of the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh and the discussions are likely to see some plainspeaking, as there is a great deal of anger against the handling of the political situation there since 2009 by central leaders. The meeting on another troubled state, Maharashtra, is slated for June 28.

At Sunday’s meeting, meanwhile, apart from losing candidates, CLP leaders, PCC chiefs, heads of frontal organizations, and election screening committees and the general secretary in charge of these states -- in this case, B.K. Hariprasad -- were interviewed.

The introspection exercise that began on Saturday with Delhi, however, was incomplete that day: former PCC chief J P Agarwal chose to skip the meeting, raising eyebrows, while former MP and ex- Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit’s son Sandip Dikshit was out of town. Both had lost their parliamentary seats to the BJP. In fact the Congress failed to retain even one of the seven seats it won in 2009.

Interestingly, Delhi Congress politics veterans and former MPs Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar, who have been kept at a distance because of their association with the anti-Sikh 1984 riots, were also called for the meeting. Others who attended were five former MPs -- Kapil Sibal, Ajay Maken, Krishna Tirath, Mahabal Mishra and Ramesh Kumar.

If the national factors cited, party sources said, included price rise, corruption and lack of communication, the Delhi leaders also attributed internal rivalry within the state unit and the Ms Sheila Dikshit’s style of functioning as some of the reasons for the party’s abysmal showing.

While conceding that the Dikshit Government had focused on development, including building flyovers, many felt that it had lost touch with the people’s issues: this ended with Ms Dikshit herself losing to AAP convener Arvind Kejriwal in last year’s Delhi Assembly elections.

Other Delhi leaders spoken to include campaign committee chairman for the Delhi Assembly elections Subhash Chopra, PCC chief Arvinder Singh Lovely and CLP leader Haroon Yusuf.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.