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

http://epaper.lokmat.com/articlepage.php?articleid=LOKTIME_NPLT_20230117_6_1

 

 


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