Wrong to blame Rahul, UPA-II was not good product: Congress leader

New Delhi, May 23: Rahul Gandhi was faced with an unenviable task in the Lok Sabha polls as UPA-II was "not a good product" that could be marketed with voters, a party leader close to the Congress Vice President has said.

'Team Rahul' is under fire from certain sections within the party on the charge that it failed to come up to expectations and botched Congress's poll prospects, but the party leader said that the attack was based on wrong assumptions and flawed assessment of the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh-led UPA-II government.

"You must remember that UPA-II saw the fiercest rivalry coming to the fore between certain senior Cabinet ministers and tit-for-tat actions by them which was followed by the leaking of the Niira Radia tapes as also 2G revelations. There was also a bugging controversy," said the Congress leader who was speaking on condition of anonymity.

A host of factors led to the UPA-II regime getting mired in controversies one after the other, beginning with the decision on a separate Telangana state announced on December 9, 2009, by the then Home Minister P Chidambaram, he said.

Incidentally, Pranab Mukherjee, then a senior minister who had earlier headed the UPA sub-committee on smaller states, was not in Delhi when the decision was taken.

Dismissing the attack by some leaders on Gandhi's advisers -- something which has been interpreted as an attack on the Congress Vice President himself -- the leader said it was merely intended to replace some people from key positions so that a number of leaders who were sidelined before can occupy the decision-making positions.

On the Lokpal issue, too, the matter went out of the hands of the government the way Anna Hazare and his supporters campaigned.

Later, the issue of Yoga Guru Ramdev was also "mishandled", he said, adding that the Lokpal Bill, which could have been introduced in 2011, had to wait till December, 2013.

"It is a wrong perception that Gandhi dictated the UPA- II agenda. Had it been so, he would not have made a sudden entry during a news conference at Press Club and commit the act of tearing up the government's controversial ordinance on convicted lawmakers," he said.

PTI