NEW DELHI: Mukul Sagma is not the only former chief minister from Congress who lost the parliamentary polls as there are eight more like him who were defeated from the party which incidentally has no MP from as many as 18 states.
The list includes former Delhi chief minister Shiela Dikshit from North East Delhi, former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijay Singh from Bhopal, former Maharashtra chief ministers Ashok Chavan from Nanded and Sushil Kumar Shinde from Solapur, former Uttarakhand chief minister Harish Rawat from Nainital, former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Hooda from Sonepat and Verrappa Moily from Chikkballur in Karnataka and Nabam Tuki from Arunachal Pradesh.
Dikshit was chief minister of Delhi for a record three terms and Digvijaya Singh for two. Shinde was not only the chief minister of Maharastra but also Union Home Minister during Narasimha Rao’s time.
If one drives from Jammu and Kashmir to Tamil Nadu, one will not find a sngle Congress MP in half-a-dozen of states. The party has scored a nil in 18 states and union territories in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
The Congress losers include, besides the eight former chief ministers, the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge who lost from Kalaburgi in Karnataka.
Among the bigger states, there are no Congress MPs in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat.
The smaller states which will not send a single Congress MP are Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Delhi and Uttarakhand.
In the eight states of North East which once used to be ruled by Congress, the grand old party has no representation in Lok Sabha in Manipur, Mizoram, Sikkim, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland. It has one MP in Vincent H Pala from Meghalaya and three from Assam.
In Assam, the party also faced a humiliating defeat with Sushmita Dev, All India President of Mahila Congress, and sitting Rajya Sabha MP Bhubaneswar Kalita biting the dust. Luckily for the party Gaurav Gogoi, son of former Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi, could make it.
BJP candidates won both the seats in Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura, while its ally Mizo National Front wrested the lone Lok Sabha seat in Mizoram from Congress. Candidates of NDPP, an ally of BJP, won the lone Nagaland seat. BJP and Naga People’s Front (NPF) candidates won one seat each in Manipur.
Barring Kerala where Congress won 15 seats, the party has not reached double figures, the closest being eight each in Punjab and Tamil Nadu.The party’s tally could not reach or surpass two in Bihar, Jharkhand, Telangana, MP, Maharashtra and Karnataka among the bigger states.