Himachal CM Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu faces blame for Congress LS polls debacle as review begins

Initiating the review of the party’s poor performance in Himachal Pradesh in the Lok Sabha elections, a two-member All India Congress Committee (AICC) team on Monday interacted with ministers and legislators from the Mandi and Hamirpur parliamentary constituencies. The Congress failed to win any of the four Lok Sabha seats in the hill state for the third straight time. It also lost Mandi, the seat that state Congress chief Pratibha Singh had won in a bypoll.

The two-member committee comprising Rajya Sabha MP Rajni Patil and former MP P L Punia met Chief Minister Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu, Deputy CM Mukesh Agnihotri, Pratibha Singh, as well as party candidates Vikramaditya Singh (Mandi), Satpal Raizada (Hamirpur) and other leaders from the two constituencies. The meetings for the constituencies of Kangra and Shimla will be held on Tuesday.

Before attending the meeting, Sukhu said, “We did lose all four parliamentary seats for a second time, but our vote share increased by 14 percentage points. However, in elections, it is the victory that matters and we have to take lessons from these results.” The Congress’s vote share rose from 27.3% to 41.67% while the BJP’s dropped from 69.11% to 56.44%.

Asked about the delay in naming the candidates, Sukhu said, “We announced the candidates’ names as per the party’s strategy and timely decided all the candidates except for Hamirpur, Satpal Raizada.” The CM, however, accepted that there was a delay in finalising the names for Hamirpur and Shimla.

Several leaders who held a one-on-one interaction with Patil and Punia told them that the Congress’s organising committee did not get the full support of the state government in some of the parliamentary constituencies. Sources privy to the