New Delhi: Nearly three months after its biggest debacle ever in the Lok Sabha elections, senior Congress leader AK Antony submitted his report to Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Thursday. In his report, Antony has blamed the loss on anti-Congress media coverage, poor local leadership, corruption, inflation and infighting in the party as some of the reasons.
However, calling for collective responsibility for the results, the Antony report is said to have rejected any blames against Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi for the defeat.
All the four members of the panel Antony, Mukul Wasnik, RC Khuntia and Avinash Pandey met the Congress President and submitted to her the voluminous report. Apart from giving a condensed over-all report on the Congress' poor show nation wide, the multi-volume report has also focused on specific states incorporating the discussions held with their leaders on the reasons for the defeat and the recommendations of the panel, the sources said.
With the Assembly polls in four states approaching, the report would help the leadership to take the remedial steps at the earliest to stem the rot. Though there was no official confirmation on this count, sources indicated that instead of being critical of the leadership, the report talks about the manipulation of media coverage by the BJP and the controversial role played by the media, the lacunae in Congress campaign vis a vis the blitzkrieg of Narendra Modi's election campaign and organisational weaknesses of the party.
The four-member panel was set up a fortnight after the results were out on May 16, which had come as a huge shock for the party. The panel had begun the review exercise in June starting from Delhi, where all its seven Lok Sabha candidates including Kapil Sibal, Ajay Maken, Krishna Tirath, J P Agrawal and Sandip Dikshit had lost.
The panel had also met the PCC chiefs, CLP leaders and other party functionaries from various states during the exercise. It was undertaken at the behest of Congress president Sonia Gandhi who was assigned by the party's apex decision-making body Congress Working Committee (CWC) to effect necessary changes in the organisational set up.
The Congress had got its lowest tally of 44 seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha in the general elections held in April-May this year.
(With PTI inputs)
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