Congress fact-finding team to review Haryana poll debacle

The Congress top brass on Thursday, 10 October, held a review meeting on the party's shock defeat in the Haryana assembly polls and decided to form a fact-finding team that will speak to all its candidates to find out the reasons for the debacle.

Sources said the leaders during the meeting discussed the possible reasons for the "unexpected" results in Haryana and decided to set up the team to ascertain the reasons behind such results and also look into complaints of "discrepancies" in EVMs, as alleged by party candidates.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, former party chief Rahul Gandhi, AICC general secretary organisation K.C. Venugopal, AICC senior observers for the polls Ashok Gehlot and Ajay Maken, as well as AICC secretaries for the state, participated in the review meeting.

AICC in-charge of Haryana Deepak Babaria joined the meeting online.

However, Haryana Congress chief Udai Bhan and CLP leader and former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and a few other senior leaders from the state were not present in the meeting.

"We held a review meeting on Haryana election results. As you all know, as the exit polls and opinion polls had showed, the results were unexpected.

"There was a lot of difference between exit polls and actual results. We discussed that, what could be the reasons for that. We will take appropriate steps going forward on this," Maken told reporters after the meeting.

The office of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge later issued a statement.

'The party has decided to depute a technical team to look into complaints and discrepancies noted by our candidates. The Congress party will issue a detailed response based on the fact-finding team's report,' AICC secretary Pranav Jha, attached to the Congress president, said in the statement.

He said that following the Congress' meeting on Thursday, 10 October, to discuss the results of Haryana elections, there have been numerous source-based news circulating in media.

'We request you to stick to our formal briefing and desist from any conjectures, that deviate from the official brief,' Jha said in his statement also posted on X.

The meeting comes a day after the Congress demanded a thorough probe into "discrepancies" found in some Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) during the counting of votes of the Haryana polls and demanded that such EVMs should be sealed and secured pending the inquiry.

A delegation of top Congress leaders comprising former chief ministers Bhupinder Singh Hooda and Ashok Gehlot and AICC leaders K.C. Venugopal, Jairam Ramesh, Ajay Maken and Pawan Khera, besides Haryana Congress chief Udai Bhan, met with top Election Commission officials here on Wednesday, 9 October.

The delegation had handed over a memorandum to the officials along with specific complaints from various constituencies in Haryana. Senior party leader Abhishek Singhvi joined the meeting online.

The Congress leaders alleged that there are at least 20 such complaints, including seven in writing from as many assembly constituencies, with many referring to EVMs functioning at 99 per cent battery capacity whereas the average EVMs were found to be operating at 60 to 70 per cent battery capacity during the counting.

Even halfway into the counting day, the party appeared confident of dislodging the BJP dispensation which was in power for 10 years and facing anti-incumbency.

However, the BJP winning 48 seats halted the Congress' comeback attempt and also proved wrong the several exit polls that had predicted a comfortable win for the grand old party in Haryana. The Congress managed to muster only 37 seats in the 90-member assembly.

Edited agency inputs