The Interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi, snubbed the G-23 leaders within her party but failed to answer several pointed questions regarding how decisions were being taken within the organization. At a Congress Working Committee meeting, held after five months, she hit out at the dissidents, reiterating that she was the party chief and instead of raising issues through the media, it would be better, if they met her personally to address the grievances. The short point is that for majority of the leaders, the Gandhis have been inaccessible and with no forum available within the party, they do not know how to get their views across. The CWC meeting turned out to be more an exercise of expressing loyalty to the family than an attempt to provide a road map so far the future strategy goes. As expected, the CWC members urged Rahul Gandhi to take over even though a schedule for the party elections was simultaneously announced. Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma and Mukul Wasnik, three of the G-23 leaders who were present, found themselves outnumbered and decided to maintain a low profile. The underlining message sent out to the dissidents by Sonia was that they carried no weight of their own and were dependent on the High Command for any positions.
However, the interim president should have known that the senior leaders have never had any problem with her leadership by and large and if they had turned dissidents, it was because certain questionable decisions which did not bear the Sonia stamp but those of the Gandhi siblings had been taken, taking the cadres by surprise. When Kapil Sibal had stated a few weeks ago that we know who was taking the decisions and yet we know who is not, he had voiced the internal concern of the rank and file. The matter that has to be understood by the High Command is that several appointments made in the recent past were not necessarily going to enhance the position of the party in the respective states and it would be better that in future, the process of wide consultations was gone through. There are also apprehensions that many sensitive decisions were prompted by the Gandhi siblings without factoring in the ramifications since there was no one in their inner group, who had the capacity to manage the consequences of the fallout. What Sonia basically achieved at the CWC meeting was that she was able to maintain a status quo till the next year’s president’s election while making it abundantly clear that the family was not going to easily give up its ownership of the grand old party. However, politics is pregnant with all kinds of possibilities and if the Congress fails to win in any of the poll bound states next year, there could be serious repercussions so far as the leadership question goes. It is being generally perceived in political circles that Priyanka has fired up the cadres in Uttar Pradesh after her Lakhimpur Kheri visit, bringing the party back into reckoning in about 30 to 40 seats.
Simultaneously, it is pointed out that any alliance with any other party in the State, may boomerang on the Congress. There are also serious doubts over the ability of Navjot Singh Sidhu to adhere to the party’s stand in Punjab unless he controls his impulsive actions and falls in line. He is certainly the stormy petrel of Punjab politics. In Delhi where the municipal polls are due, Anil Chaudhury’s leadership as the PCC president, has proved to be unsatisfactory since he has not been able to carry the rest of the leaders. It is being suggested that the best person to head the party in Delhi would be either Arvinder Singh Lovely or Hari Shankar Gupta. The Working Committee also failed to discuss the issue of opposition unity and it is evident that Sonia by declaring that she was going to heading the party, has sent out an important signal that without the Congress as the nucleus, no opposition federal front can be effectively formed. The Congress High Command is responsible for the state the Congress is in and by resigning from his position in 2019, Rahul had acknowledged this fact.
However, ever since then, uncertainty over his return has existed and this has harmed the party more than helping it out. The Congress needs someone who can assume the role of Ahmed Patel in sorting out things before they go out of control. For this the Gandhis have to prepare themselves to zero in on such a person from amongst senior leaders, who has the energy, understanding and the ability to carry everyone with the party. The road ahead is not going to be smooth with both Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, posing pragmatic and hard challenges.