The Congress is readying itself with long-term plans to expose the Bharatiya Janata Party's failure to combat terrorism.

The move is seen as a bid to take the steam out of BJP's long-drawn election-plans in the next round of the assembly polls due in two phases in nine states.

Spokesman S Jaipal Reddy accused the ruling coalition of "utter failure to combat terrorism that had spread its network to many nook and corners of the country beyond Jammu and Kashmir during the last several years of the latter's regime".

He was addressing newspersons after several rounds of informal post-mortems of the Congress debacle in Gujarat assembly election. Insiders say the party acknowledged the fact that it was the fear of terrorism that was successfully exploited by the BJP for its electoral fortunes.

Struggling to come to terms to its worst electoral debacle in recent times, the first task for the party would be to win the next round of assembly elections in the four states of Himachal Pradesh, Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland in February 2003.

The party will face one more test in the latter round of assembly polls in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi, Chattisgarh and Mizoram. Except for Mizoram all the other four states have Congress governments.