Watch Nidhi Razdan: Congress party needs to go back to the drawing board in India

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Transcript

00:00The Maharashtra election has been an unmitigated disaster for the Congress party which only

00:07six months ago did relatively better in the Lok Sabha polls with 99 seats and actually

00:12did really well in Maharashtra in particular along with its allies Sharad Pawar and Uddhav

00:18Thackeray. So what went wrong for the party? At the moment, it really needs to go back

00:22to the drawing board because after the Lok Sabha elections, the Congress lost Haryana

00:27which was a complete shocker. It did badly in Jammu and Kashmir and now it has lost Maharashtra

00:33coming up to its worst ever tally in the state with just 16 seats. Not only that, it had

00:39direct contests with the BJP in Maharashtra in as many as 75 seats and the BJP won 65

00:46of those. Part of the problem with the Congress is its lackluster campaigning. Anyone that

00:51you spoke to in Maharashtra during the course of the campaign would tell you that the Congress's

00:56campaign was just not spirited. It wasn't there. Rahul Gandhi barely did any rallies

01:01in Maharashtra much like in Jammu and Kashmir. That's one. The second problem seems to be

01:06what message or what campaign theme to go to with people because whatever worked for

01:11them in the Lok Sabha clearly did not work at the assembly election level. So when you

01:16talk about things like threats to the constitution, reservations, caste census, these are things

01:21that voters know a central government can change or has the power to do something about.

01:27But when it comes to state polls, those same issues do not resonate with people. For them,

01:32it's more about everyday bread and butter issues. And for some reason, the Congress

01:37and its allies in Maharashtra were completely unable to have that kind of a message for

01:42voters that they spoke to. Ultimately, though, the Congress needs a total overhaul. It's

01:48clear that the Gandhi family is the central nucleus of the party. The fact that Priyanka

01:52Gandhi has won from Wayanad with such a huge majority only cements that. But they need

01:58to find a new way to do things, to have a new set of people around them and to take

02:02responsibility for the blunders that they have committed over the last few years.