Just a year after the debacle in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections, the Congress party’s latest hammering at the assembly polls in four states, has cast a shadow on the leadership qualities of its vice-president Rahul Gandhi and his aides.
Party leaders fear the results, which have virtually thrown the Congress out of the reckoning in most parts of North India, will cast a shadow on the 2014 Lok Sabha polls as well. Though there are murmurs against Rahul’s leadership and the call for Congress president Sonia Gandhi to rein him in has become shriller, knives are out at the party headquarters against Rahul Gandhi’s aides.
As the results started pouring in, party leaders, who sat with Congress president Sonia Gandhi, pleaded with her to bring back the old guard, who are experienced in electoral politics, to steer the party for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections rather than vest authority in Rahul’s greenhorns.
While central leaders were mostly baying for the blood of general secretary Madhusudan Mistry, Rahul Gandhi’s point man, Delhi Congress leaders were targeting chief minister Sheila Dikshit, even accusing her of being under the shadow of an astrologer who had predicted her a fourth term. The leaders who met Sonia Gandhi wanted Union minister Oscar Fernandes and Ghulam Nabi Azad to be brought back in place of Mistry and others.
Even the Centre’s most successful minister Jairam Ramesh has come under attack for misleading Rahul, along with Sandeep Dikshit and Deepender Hooda, both MPs. For the sake of the party’s revival, sources close to these leaders said, they pleaded for junking the four-tier process set into motion by Rahul Gandhi for the selection of candidates on the basis of assessments made by two private agencies.
Meanwhile, as for the debacle in Delhi a senior Congress leader blamed the arrogance of chief minister Sheila Dikshit for the party’s crushing defeat.
“Sheila misled the high command. She gave away tickets to candidates who were sure to lose. It is because of her wrong decisions that the party cadre also acted against the party,” the leader told dna. He also accused Dikshit of foiling Rahul Gandhi’s road show, and preventing prime minister Manmohan Singh from addressing a rally in the national capital.
Party workers in Delhi also feel that the differences between Dikshit and DPCC have led to the ignominious defeat. The leader said the chief minister never visited the party office. An astrologer predicted Dikshit a fourth term and she took his words as gospel truth rather than motivating and energising the cadre, he said.
In Rajasthan, Rahul Gandhi’s close associate CP Joshi has come under scrutiny as his stand that newly-elected MLAs would decide on the chief minister had undermined Ashok Gehlot at a time when he was offering sops and announcing social schemes.
In Madhya Pradesh, the troika of Jyotiraditya Scindia, Digvijay Singh and Kamal Nath projected a fractured party and didn’t inform the party command till the Lok Sabha MP from Hoshangabad, Udai Pratap, defected to the BJP. A day earlier, Pratap had gone to the Lok Sabha secretariat to tender his resignation but nobody — not even Kamal Nath, the parliamentary affairs minister, knew about it nor did he alert Rahul or Sonia.
In a rare media interaction at party headquarters, Sonia Gandhi said: “General elections are quite different. People in state elections focus on the personality of the person who is leading their government, and at the national level, people look at the person who is looking to lead them at the national level. The issues will be slightly different. At the state level they are localised, at the national level they are nationalised.”
When a reporter asked how the Congress is going to fight the Lok Sabha polls without an effective face against the BJP’s PM candidate Narendra Modi, she quipped: “People need not worry; the party will announce the name of the prime ministerial candidate at an opportune time.”
Rahul Gandhi felt sad that Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit lost despite hard work and good governance and talked of learning from the way the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) involved a lot of people unlike the traditional parties “and we are going to do a better job than anyone else in the country in ways you cannot imagine right now”.
Sonia Gandhi’s call for “deep introspection” within the party sent shivers down the spines of new general secretaries like Gurudas Kamat, in charge of Rajasthan, CP Joshi who forced selection of maximum candidates against the wishes of Gehlot, Shakeel Ahmed, in charge of Delhi, and Mohan Prakash overseeing Madhya Pradesh polls, as also Madhusudan Mistry, a former Gujarat MP, as their performance will now come under scrutiny.
Sonia Gandhi set off her interaction with the media saying, “It goes without saying that we are disappointed with the results; we accept the peoples’ verdict with humility and we congratulate our opponents for victory”.
“We are very very disappointed with the results and we need to introspect.” Sonia went on to say, “Obviously people are unhappy otherwise they would not have given such results.”
“Naturally, this result calls for deep introspection. We have to understand to look at the any reasons for this defeat.”
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