Today in Politics: Congress begins strategy meetings for coming Assembly elections

After recording a much improved performance in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections compared to 2019, the Congress is set to begin a series of strategy meetings within the party to prepare for the Assembly elections scheduled for the latter half of the year in Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and MP Rahul Gandhi are set to begin the strategy meetings on Monday with Jharkhand leaders. The meetings for Maharashtra, Haryana and J&K will take place between June 25 and 27.

“Carrying forward the momentum in our favour, we are dedicated to ensuring a handsome victory in the upcoming state elections. To kickstart our efforts, Mallikarjun Kharge ji and Rahul Gandhi ji will be holding strategy meetings with senior leaders of the election-going states… Onward and upwards!” AICC general secretary (organisation) K C Venugopal said in a post on X.

While the Supreme Court has ordered for elections to be held in J&K before September 30, the remaining states are slated to hold polls in November and December.

In 2019, the Congress had won 44 of the 288 seats in Maharashtra, 31 of the 90 seats in Haryana and 16 of the 81 seats in Jharkhand. While it came to power in Maharashtra with the Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) after the Sena-BJP alliance collapsed and in Jharkhand with its ally Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), it fell short of the majority mark in Haryana, where the BJP need the Jannayak Janta Party (JJP) to form a coalition government.

The upcoming polls are likely to be hotly contested – the INDIA bloc managed to outperform the NDA in Maharashtra and the Congress split Haryana evenly with the BJP in the Lok Sabha polls, giving the leading Opposition party a