Congress Conundrum : The Resurrection And The Reality
BY R.K.MISRA
Failure fuels a win if you don’t make losing a habit.
The factsheet suggests that the Congress with seven consecutive
defeats in Gujarat may well lose on the curves what it gains on the straights
with elections to nine state assemblies due this year.
The
stupendous success of Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat-jodo’ yatra has resurrected him as a leader of credence and the Congress as the
only national party capable of taking on the Narendra Modi-led BJP. However the ignominious Gujarat defeat has exposed chinks in the Congress party’s
national armour which cannot be papered over by the tepid win in Himachal
Pradesh.
The states headed for the hustings are Madhya
Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana, and the north-eastern states of Tripura,
Meghalaya, Nagaland and Mizoram besides the Congress ruled states of Rajasthan
and Chhattisgarh. There is also
speculation that Jammu and Kashmir may be added to this list.
Round the clock
electioneers, the ruling BJP has already switched gears of central events and
high-profile photo-optic state government inaugurations- like the ‘bombarding’
witnessed in the run-up to the Gujarat polls- towards these states. The
Centre’s eye-piece event, The Pravasi Bhartiya Diwas was held this time at
Indore from January 8 to 10. It was followed by the Madhya Pradesh Global
Investors summit over the next two days with the country’s top business names
announcing a slew of investments . Said chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan that the state had received proposals
worth Rs 15 lakh,42 thousand crores with
the likelihood of providing employment to 29 lakh people. BJP ruled Karnataka
had held a similar event in November last year where MOUs worth Rs 10 lakh
crores were signed. Chief minister Basavaraj Bommai admitted
that in 2000 MOUs worth Rs 27,057 crores were signed but only 44 per cent -Rs
12,000 crore was actually invested. On January 12, Prime Minister Narendra Modi
had a road-show and inaugurated the 29th
national youth festival. Similarly union home minister Amit Shah
inaugurated 12 projects worth Rs 300 crores
and laid the foundation stones for nine schemes worth Rs 1060 crores in Manipur
on January 6.
If this provides
a mere glimpse of the BJP ruled-centre as well as their state government’s
exercise in election-headed states, the Congress, which is its main challenger
, is still to stir into any sort of visible
activity with its state units mired in debilitating fratricidal fights.
In Gujarat where
Congress received the drubbing of a lifetime, the situation is pathetic.
The party is yet to name a leader of the
Congress Opposition even a month after the election results were declared. The
Gujarat Assembly secretariat has asked the opposition Congress to name the CLP
leader by January 19. The ruling party does not favour giving Congress the official nomenclature of Leader of the Opposition due to its inadequate numbers
though when in power Congress had given
BJP the post even though it had only 14 members in the House. If denied this privilege it may also not figure in the Public Accounts
Committee. BJP had bagged 156 of the total 182 seats leaving the Congress with
17, AAP five, Samajwadi party one and three independents.
Again, on
January 4 Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had constituted a 3- member
fact finding team to go into the party’s Gujarat debacle. Headed by former Maharashtra minister Nitin Raut , Shakeel
Ahmed Khan the panel was supposed to
give its report within a fortnight. Its two day visit is too short to even scrape the surface of
the maladies afflicting the Gujarat unit of the party.
The Gujarat
Congress is a house divided against itself and
comprises leaders who have failed to a win an election themselves
through successive polls. The AICC is reported to have been flooded with
complaints by both candidates and cadres against leaders who remained inactive
or were more concerned in getting tickets for their henchmen. Some of the
charges pertain to hobnobbing with the ruling party against their own party candidates for pecuniary
considerations.
Old timers carry
fond memories of how Mrs Indira Gandhi when faced with a similar situation had
purged the party of ‘deadwood’ and
injected youth who later carried the party to power. These included,
among others, Madhavsinh Solanki, Jhinabhai Darji, Yogendra Makwana, Sanat
Mehta , Prabodh Raval and Amarsinh Chaudhary. Solanki and Chaudhary, both
subsequently became chief minister with the former holding the record of
bagging 149 of the 182 seats in the 1985 polls. This record was recently broken
by the BJP. Makwana was a union minister and the remaining ministers in the
state government. Darji was the architect of the KHAM
theory(kshatriya,harijan,Adivasi and muslims) ,a combination which was put
together to bring the party to power in the state bypassing the powerful Patidar
community.
Sources within the
party aver that all the gains of the Rahul Gandhi- led ‘Bharat-jodo’ will stand
frittered away if the state-units are not
thoroughly revamped and conditions created for injecting large doses of
the young into the party. “The business interests of some of these leaders is
easy fodder for the ruling party which also keeps a sharp look-out and weans away
enterprising talent to their own fold. A crash programme is needed to rejuvenate the party with committed
youth-manpower at the grassroot level to take on the Modi- led BJP in the
2024 parliamentary elections. It is not
about Gujarat but mirrors the prevailing situation in almost all the state
units of the Congress”, points out a senior Congress leader.
P.S. The day
this syndicated column appeared in the respective newspapers, All India
Congress Committee(AICC) announced the appointment of five time legislator, Amit Chavda as leader
of its legislature party with Shailesh Parmar as the deputy leader in Gujarat.
http://odishapostepaper.com/edition/4365/orissapost/page/9
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