The Congress in Delhi is going the way the party went in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi in his enthusiasm to build an alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in Delhi, may have inadvertently ended up playing the role which late veteran Sitaram Kesri played in the 1990s, making the Congress play second fiddle to an emerging political rival than counter it.
As the city prepares for polling in May end, former Delhi Congress president Arvinder Singh Lovely, who recently stepped down from his position to protest the party’s alliance with the AAP for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections, has joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Along with Lovely, former Congress MLAs Raj Kumar Chauhan, Naseeb Singh, Neeraj Basoya, and former Youth Congress President Amit Malik also joined the BJP. Chauhan was a minister in Sheila Dikshit’s government for more than 10 years. Naseeb Singh was a parliamentary secretary to the late leader.
Coming back to Kesri, he was an influential leader from Bihar who, for long, remained the treasurer of the Congress party before succeeding PV Narasimha Rao as the Congress president. Coming from the backward classes, Kesri always resented the dominance of the upper castes in the Congress organisation, especially in his home state of Bihar and the neighbouring Uttar Pradesh. He pushed the party, when ousted from power in both the states, to play second fiddle to the caste-based parties in the post-Mandal politics, as mentioned earlier, of the 1990s. The party never recovered from that mindset of playing a lackey and now has been reduced to the periphery.
The latest development in Delhi, which has seen a large number of established leaders of the Congress desert, could well be a reenactment of what had happened in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. The party leadership, in sidelining its known leaders with imports like Kanhaiya Kumar and Udit Raj, has failed to realise that it could well be the beginning of the end of the Congress organisation in the national Capital.
Despite not having any representative either in the state assembly or the Parliament from Delhi, the Delhi Congress kept the heat up on the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). It was the Congress that first scented a scam in the now-disbanded liquor policy of the Delhi government and moved appropriate forums for the investigation. The inquiries have now culminated in several AAP leaders including Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal getting incarcerated in the Tihar Central Jail.
About a week ago, while stepping down as Delhi Congress president, Lovely wrote to Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge citing his discontent with the party’s decision-making process, particularly criticising the selection of candidates like Kanhaiya Kumar and Udit Raj for the Delhi constituencies. While Lovely joining the BJP may have led to some loss of credibility for the leader, the issues raised by him remain relevant, especially in the context of the two imports – Kanhaiya Kumar and Udit Raj. The local leader’s anger is more towards Kanhaiya Kumar who has preferred playing the chosen one of the AAP than the Congress candidate.
Kanhaiya Kumar, a former cadre of the Communist Party of India, has been giving statements praising the Delhi CM, which has annoyed the party workers. He has been charged with endorsing false propaganda of AAP with regard to the supposed works done by them in the education, health, road and electricity sectors. At the time of entering into the alliance, the Congress leadership had said that it was not doing so in recognition of AAP’s supposed achievements in Delhi, but rather to prevent a split in the vote to defeat the BJP in the national elections.
Some believe that Rahul Gandhi sees Kanhaiya Kumar carrying the elixir to revive the Delhi unit. Even if he were to lose in the parliamentary polls, he would be foisted as the leader of the Delhi Congress. Maybe Rahul Gandhi is taking a cue from what his mother Sonia Gandhi did by bringing Sheila Dikshit to contest the Lok Sabha polls from East Delhi in 1998. Though Dikshit lost, she was made the Delhi Congress president in the subsequent months and later led the party for the next 15 years winning three Assembly polls.
But what Rahul Gandhi fails to appreciate is that Dikshit was a thoroughbread Congressperson having worked as a political secretary to her father-in-law Uma Shankar Dikshit, a Central minister in Indira Gandhi’s government. She later worked as a minister in charge of the Prime Minister’s Office during Rajiv Gandh’s tenure. Even before she entered the Delhi Congress, she was very well acquainted with its leadership.
Comparatively, Kanhaiya Kumar is a novice. His political journey so far has been that of a rabble-rouser on the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus to being a YouTube fixture. He may have walked thousands of kilometres with Rahul Gandhi during his yatras but Kanhaiya Kumar doesn’t have exposure to a political organisation. He also is no Revanth Reddy, who won Telangana in the Assembly polls for the Congress party. Reddy has been active in legislative politics for almost 25 years now, having been a member of the legislative council, legislative assembly and also, the Parliament. He won Lok Sabha polls in 2019 when the fortunes of the Congress party had ebbed like never before.
Kanhaiya Kumar’s resume carries no such credentials. Secondly in Delhi, Dikshit during her tenure had created a second line of leadership with sufficient exposure to the organisation and the government. It would not be easy or wise to replace them with a comparative minion.
The writer is author and president, Centre for Reforms, Development & Justice. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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