Senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid said on Monday that his party’s “alternative style and method” didn’t work in Gujarat, where the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) offered “novel and new idea”. The former Union Minister said the Assembly election results in Himachal Pradesh, where the Congress edged the BJP out of power, has given the party a new sense of purpose.
The Congress won just 17 seats in Gujarat, while bagging 40 seats in the 68-member Himachal House. Speaking on the Gujarat Assembly elections, he said the party was in difficulty even before the polls.
“Lot of our Gujarat politics was based on what happened before the last elections, Patidar movement and so on. We considerably shifted our base to try and capture something that we haven’t had in the past but unfortunately it wasn’t sustainable,” he said.
Khurshid said the Congress keeps “saying the same thing”. “We all know what needs to be done, everybody knows what needs to be done, the workers must now cooperate with the leadership to achieve what needs to be done. Connectivity is the basic issue, real or virtual connectivity is the order of the day, we want real connectivity and we will try to get that real connectivity as quickly as possible,” he said.
“If you just look at the arithmetic of how much we lost and how much AAP gained, they (AAP) clearly offered a novel, new idea and therefore one who was a little bit vulnerable has been hurt. Aam Aadmi Party tries to get our votes wherever it can; you can see a pattern of where they participate, which state they participate. Wherever the BJP is a major dominant party with the absence of Congress, the AAP does not go,” Khurshid said.
