Earlier this week, Sanjay Jha (former National Spokesperson of the Indian National Congress) claimed that over 300 party leaders had signed a letter of dissent, asking for the complete overhaul of the “grand old party”. In the following Congress Working Committee meeting, 23 leaders took up a letter to Sonia Gandhi reiterating such sweeping changes within the party which included senior leader Kapil Sibal. The former letter, which had over 300 signatories, included leaders such as Shashi Tharoor, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Manish Tewari, Prithviraj Chavan and Anand Sharma.
In the meeting, the 23 signatories were criticized of their intentions and questioned about the same incessantly with Rahul Gandhi questioning, specifically, the timing of the letter which coincided with his mother being admitted to the hospital and the Rajasthan crisis that occurred recently. He also, allegedly, accused the signatories of the letter to have “colluded with the BJP” for which he faced severe backlash, from both sides of the aisle. Kapil Sibal took to Twitter hitting back at the same, although he later went on to delete said tweet after a personal clarification from Rahul Gandhi claiming that he never made such statements of collusion and that it was a case of misreporting.
Sonia Gandhi also offered to resign as Congress Chief over the row. However, and unsurprisingly, the Working Committee decided to continue with Sonia Gandhi in the role of ‘interim’ president until such a time that an All India Congress Committee session can be convened. Many top leaders also showed their support for the continuation for the Gandhi family to remain at the helm including the Chief Ministers of Rajasthan, Punjab, Puducherry and Chhattisgarh and some called for Rahul Gandhi to clarify his stance on taking up the post as party president.
This seems to be repeat problem within the Congress party where dissenters are often silenced or shunned for not remaining ‘loyal’ to the party as we saw earlier with the suspension of Sanjay Jha. Opposition parties quickly took advantage of the situation as well to push their narratives with BJP leader Uma Bharti saying that the Gandhi-Nehru family’s existence is “finished” and so is Congress’ existence, and Shivraj Singh Chouhan saying that Congress leaders don’t have the courage to listen to the truth and that opposers are labelled traitors.
Whether this means there will be structural changes to the Congress party, starting from the end of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, is still unclear seeing that such criticisms of the leadership have been countered successfully in the past. It is a recurring theme to observe that dissenters are slowly distanced from the family and the party, indifferent to their motives and ambitions. However, this is one of the first times and at this scale, that such change is being called for under Sonia Gandhi with the Congress party not in power at the center and this leaves some room for expectation of concrete change within the party. Nevertheless, it will draw little surprise if Sonia Gandhi retains her post with no change to the party or if Rahul Gandhi takes up said post despite his previous ambiguity surrounding the same, as we see from precedent. Only time will tell which way the chips will fall.
Comments