Senior Congress leader and former PCC president Niranjan Patnaik on Thursday blamed the party’s State and central leaderships for the miserable show of the Congress in the ongoing panchayat elections.
He attributed lack of coordination and discipline among the party leaders for the debacle.
“We are solely responsible for the miserable performance. We have utterly failed in reaching out to the people at the right time. We have not made sincere efforts to make the people believe us. Hence, there is no point in blaming others as we have to accept the defeat and respect the people’s mandate,” said Patnaik.
On the BJP’s victory, he said, “People of Odisha have started turning back their face from the BJD. At the same time, they couldn’t repose their trust on the Congress due to indiscipline and inability among us. There is no organisation in the party for last few years in the State, resulting in our poor performance. So, the people have chosen the BJP,” Patnaik said.
Maintaining that it was beyond his imagination that Congress could perform so poorly in this election, Patnaik said, “I expected that the party would retain at least the same number of seats it had got in the last panchayat polls. I hope that the results in last three phases of the polls would improve.”
Notably, the Congress failed to open account in as many as 22 districts in the Zilla Parishad elections in the first two rounds of the polls.