New Delhi:The "biggest lesson" from Haryana is that one should never be "overconfident" in the elections, AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal said on Tuesday after the Congress failed to come back to power in the assembly polls despite 10 years of anti-incumbency against the BJP. The Aam Aadmi Party and Congress failed to stitch up a pre-poll alliance due to differences over seat sharing.
While the AAP has lost on all seats it contested, the Congress has also fallen well short of the majority mark in the state, and the ruling BJP is all set to form the government for the third consecutive time. "The biggest lesson of this is that one should never be overconfident in the elections," said Kejriwal while addressing a gathering of the AAP municipal councillors at an event.
"No election should be taken lightly. Each election and each seat is tough," he added. In the Lok Sabha polls this year, the AAP and the Congress fought elections together in Haryana. As part of their agreement, the Aam Aadmi Party contested only one seat, but it lost while the Congress won five out of 10 Lok Sabha seats in Haryana.
Reacting to the results of Haryana Assembly polls, AAP's state chief Sushil Gupta said that outcome would have been different if there would have been an alliance like the Lok Sabha elections. Both parties were part of the opposition INDIA bloc in the Lok Sabha polls. "The outcome would have been different if the alliance (of AAP-Congress) had participated in this (Haryana's) assembly election as well...," Gupta said.
According to Gupta, they faced challenging conditions during campaigning due to imprisonment of several senior AAP leaders in "fake" cases. The Haryana Assembly poll outcome has come as a blow to the AAP which hoped to make a mark in the elections. The party drew a blank so far with its senior vice president of the state unit Anurag Dhanda among those who suffered a big defeat.
Dhanda, who contested from the Kalayat seat in the Kaithal district, ended up at the seventh position with Congress' Vikas Saharan, who won, getting around 40,000 votes more than the AAP leader. During the poll campaign in Haryana, Kejriwal had asserted that no party can form the government in the state without the AAP's support.
