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00:00The results of the Haryana and Jammu and Kashmir Assembly elections have a huge national impact,
00:09particularly for the Congress Party, which has done dismally in both these states. In
00:14Jammu and Kashmir, even though the Congress has come to power in alliance with the National
00:18Conference, the fact is that a lion's share of the seats were won by the Jammu Kashmir
00:23National Conference. The Congress won only six seats and only one from Jammu, which is
00:28where the BJP's bastion lies. That would be one worry for the party. But the even bigger
00:34worry was what happened in Haryana, a state which was there for the Congress's taking,
00:38with anti-incumbency anger over the farmer agitation, the Agni Veer scheme, anti-incumbency.
00:45The BJP was really in a lot of trouble in Haryana at one point, and somehow the Congress
00:50has managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. There will be many lessons from
00:54this, not least of which is that overconfidence and complacency simply have no place in Indian
01:00politics. The fact is that the opposition and the Congress in particular have been quite
01:05overconfident since the Lok Sabha election results, in which the BJP performed much below
01:09expectations and stopped at the number of 240, not even able to reach a majority on
01:15its own. It was immediately assumed then that the BJP was on a slide downwards, that it
01:21was unravelling and that the opposition was on the upswing. What these state elections
01:25have shown is that that is not the case and that there is no place for overconfidence
01:31in politics. Rahul Gandhi in fact went off to the United States, bang in the middle of
01:36this campaign for a visit that lasted for more than a week. Where was the pressing need
01:41for a visit like that at this particular time? There simply wasn't enough that the Congress
01:47top leadership put in when it came to campaigns both in Haryana as well as in Jammu and Kashmir.
01:52If you look at Haryana, the party also has a huge factionalism problem, an infighting
01:57problem and what the lesson also is from this election is that the Congress needs to continue
02:04to look at strategic alliances, especially in those states where it is in a direct contest
02:09with the BJP. It smartly did that during the Lok Sabha elections where it actually contested
02:15the fewer number of seats in Parliament, the fewest that it had ever contested and
02:20actually ended up doing better. And that's what the Congress needs to keep in mind because
02:24it continues to be the weakest link in a direct contest with the BJP. And now this makes the
02:31Maharashtra and Jharkhand elections even more critical because the Congress is going in
02:36with an alliance in Maharashtra as well. It's on the back foot there now. The BJP's morale
02:41has certainly been boosted and if the BJP does well in Maharashtra and Jharkhand, then
02:47that entire sort of narrative that it's unravelling has completely been washed away. So, the opposition
02:54needs to do much, much more in these two states in order to seize the narrative back.