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Cong (I) will win less than 100 seats, predicts BJP
NEW DELHI. Dec 23: India's once-domlnant Congress (1) Party will win less than 100 seats in national elections early next year, its main rival said here today, reports AFP.
The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP. Indian People's Party), vying with the Congress to take power, predicted its rival which was rocked by a series of splits, would be routed at the ballot box in February.
KR Malkani. a prominent BJP member of parliament, said: "The Congress is falling to pieces ... today the party is more dead than alive."
Newspapers, meanwhile, blamed Congress President Sitaram Kesri for the fragmentation of a party which ruled the country unchallenged for the first 40 years of independence.
Malkani added: ’ "Kesri is partly to be blamed for the chaos in the Congress. But the
main reason for its problems is that the party has no philosophy. Ideology or political convictions."
He said the Congress ' will get less than 100 seats” in parliament's 545-seat lower house "while the BJP and its allies will have 300 plus."
Kesri, whose party won 140 seats in elections in 1996. found himself the target today after two prominent Congress leaders walked out on the party on Sunday and Monday.
The Indian Express branded him a "clueless boss." adding he was a "weakling" without grassroots support. The Congress, it said, had "got the leader they deserve. It is pointless to com-pla'in now."
It said the 112-year-old party had itself provoked the elections by withdrawing support from Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral's minority coalition government last month, adding: "The Congressmen's
confidence to face the elections seems to have evaporated Into thin air."
On Monday Mamata Banerjee, a Congress leader with mass support in West Bengal, announced she would contest the elections after forming her own party. She was immediately expelled by the Congress.
Twenty-four hours earlier, another Congress leader broke away in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.
Senior Congress member of parliament Rajesh Pilot virtually blamed the party leadership for the latest reverses.
I wish the situation was better handled by Kesri". Pilot said, but added the two leaders who abandoned the Congress were also to be blamed.
Both the Congress and the BJP. which won 162 seats in the lower house last year, are trying to forge pre-poll alliances with a view to heading a new coalition government.