Buoyed by the party’s emphatic victory in the recent Karnataka elections, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi on Monday exuded confidence that the party will continue its winning streak in Karnataka and win 150 seats in the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, slated to be held later this year.
Speaking to the media after attending the party’s poll preparedness meeting at the AICC headquarters in Delhi, the former Congress president said the party win Madhya Pradesh just like it did in Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh.
“We had a lengthy discussion. It is our internal assessment that we got 136 in Karnataka. In Madhya Pradesh we are going to get 150 seats. What we did in Karnataka we are going to repeat that (in Madhya Pradesh),” Gandhi told reporters after the meeting.
Gandhi along with Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge held a meeting with party top leaders, including former chief minister and president of Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) Kamal Nath and AICC in-charge of MP, P Aggarwal, over poll preparedness.
However, Gandhi parried a query on who would be the chief ministerial candidate in the state.
Meanwhile, incumbent Chief Minister and BJP leader Shivraj Singh Chouhan reacted to Gandhi’s claim of winning 150 seats said that the saffron party will win 200 seats in the 230-member Madhya Pradesh Assembly.
The same claim was also made by BJP leader VD Sharma, who said that the party will get 200 seats, based on their development model.
In the 2018 elections, the Congress won 114 seats out of 230, and formed the government with Kamal Nath as the Chief Minister. However, the government collapsed in 2020 after 23 Congress MLAs owing allegiance with Jyotiraditya Scindia resigned after the latter joined the BJP.
The BJP came to power in the state and Shivraj Singh Chouhan was sworn in as the CM, and the party won 19 out of the 28 seats in the assembly bypolls that were held later that year.
Besides Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh will also go to polls, and the Assembly elections will be a litmus test for the Congress party, with just months left to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.