Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge File
| Photo Credit: PTI
Nearly two months after the announcement of Lok Sabha election results, the Congress’s central leadership will hold a review of its performance in Karnataka, at a meeting chaired by Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge in Delhi on Tuesday.
Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Deputy CM D.K. Shivakumar, and other senior leaders will be attending the meeting. A three-member committee that was constituted on June 21 will also submit its report. The committee consisting of Congress general secretary Madhusudan Mistry, the party’s Deputy Leader in the Lok Sabha Gaurav Gogoi, and Kerala MP Hibi Eden, as per sources had concluded that candidate selection was one of the primary reasons for the below-par results.
Of the 28 seats in the State, the Congress won only nine, while the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance bagged 19. The party secured only one seat in 2019 and though it had been a significant jump this time round, party insiders claim they expected the Congress to outdo the BJP in Karnataka. The 2024 tally is the same as the result in 2014, and is the party’s best performance since 1999, when it won 18 seats.
Many of the party’s stalwarts lost the election, including Mr. Shivakumar’s brother D.K. Suresh, who was the lone Congress MP from the State in 2019. The party also fielded children of six sitting Ministers, of whom three won.
The alliance between the BJP and Janata Dal (Secular), the committee said, worked well contrary to the State leadership’s assumption. The committee had noted that there was a consolidation of the Vokkaliga votes in favour of the BJP alliance, and this too contributed to a low vote share-to-seats ratio. The Congress’s 13.55% rise in vote share did not translate to a jump in seats, the committee stated.
The Lok Sabha election also came just a year after the party’s victory in the 2023 Assembly election. The Karnataka government led by Mr. Siddaramiah came up with a host of welfare schemes, and while these schemes were quoted as success stories by the party across the country during the 2024 campaign, they failed to swing votes in the party’s favour in Karnataka.
