Congress continues its flop show in Karimnagar

Karimnagar: The Congress party that once exercised strong power in Karimnagar and produced eminent leaders like Ponnam Prabhakar, D Sridhar Babu and MLC T Jeevan Reddy, has lost its glory and became a sinking ship with no one to revive with its utter flop show in the recently held municipal elections.

Group politics and lack of cadre has pushed the Congress into present pathetic situation in the district. Further, the party leadership which has failed to learn from its previous mistakes has been giving the ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi and Bharatiya Janata Party a chance to flourish in the district.

It can be recalled that the grand old party has continued its poor show ever since the Assembly elections were held in December 2018. Out of 13 Assembly segments in the district, it won only one seat from Manthini. Similarly, in gram panchayat elections held in January 2019, the Congress party won just 48 panchayats out of 700 panchayats.

After tasting the massive defeat in Assembly and gram panchayat polls, the Congress party and its leadership focused to strengthen the party from village level with the formation of new committees separately for each district by dissolving the previous ones. It also announced new DCC presidents separately for Karimnagar, Peddapalli, Rajanna-Sircilla and Jagitial districts and contested the MLC elections, where in former Minister and Karimnagar Graduate MLC candidate T Jeevan Reddy emerged victorious.

After winning the Graduates MLC elections, the party tried to continue the same spirit to win the Zilla Parishad elections and the responsibility was entrusted to senior leaders of the party. The party also implemented the process of select and elect method and also took affidavits from candidates with the promise that they would not defect to other parties after winning the elections. Despite all this, the Congress continued its poor show and was unable to grab even a single Zilla Parishad chairperson post.

With the debacle, the second rung leaders blamed the party leadership for not allotting the tickets to winning horses in Parishad elections and unable to continue in the party due to internal difference within the party leaders, many of them either joined the TRS or the BJP.

Without learning lessons from the mistakes the party committed in the past and not taking suggestions and opinions of some of the senior leaders in the party, the Karimnagar DCC president, Katakam Mruthyunjayam, and city president Karra Rajashekar resigned from the party when the TPCC working president Ponnam Prabhakar appointed a committee with 16 members as observers to select the candidates for municipal polls.

Moreover, the party announced Pyata Ramesh as its Mayor candidate just a few days before the elections without giving him much time for campaigning. With this, the Congress continued its flop show once again by not opening its account in the municipal elections even though it contested more than 50 divisions out of 60 in Karimnagar Municipal Corporation for the first time in its history.