The battle within Congress, the grand old party has caused huge unrest among its senior and marginalised leaders alike much to the pleasure of ruling BJP that has been on back-foot in the past few months.
The struggle among the leaders those who see a bleak future under current leadership and those who believe that the future of this party rests in Gandhi scion taking full control of the party. The crisis is symbolized by Captain Amarinder Singh’s announcement that he would quit the party. As both Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi assert authority and alienate established leaders, this battle will only intensify further.
With senior party leaders on quitting spree and others on poaching, the veterans seems worried about the bleak future of the party
Picking the thread, the G-23 group of leaders, who have been demanding reforms within the Congress party and reiterating their calls for change, have once again raised their reservations following the crisis in the party in Punjab as well as the exit of a senior leader from its Goa unit. Ghulam Nabi Azad has written to interim president Sonia Gandhi seeking a Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting to discuss the Punjab and Goa situation as well as the mass exodus from the organization. Some of the G-23 leaders had met at Azad’s house, where it was decided that he should write to Sonia Gandhi expressing their major concerns.
Another senior member of G-23, Kapil Sibal, demanded “open dialogue” and introspection, questioning the lack of clarity in the decision-making process. Senior party leader Kapil Sibal said: “In our party, at the moment, there is no president, so we don’t know who is taking these decisions. We know and yet we don’t know.”
Both Azad and Sibal again demanded elections for the post of the party president and a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC). Without mentioning the Gandhis, Sibal talked about the defections of Luizinho Faleiro in Goa, Sushmita Dev in Assam, Jyotiradtiya Scindia in Madhya Pradesh and LaliteshTripathi in Uttar Pradesh, among others, and said: “It’s ironic that those who were their khasam-khaas (special ones), they left them. And those people who they believed are not their special ones, they are standing with them today.” He added, “One thing is clear, we are not ‘Ji Huzoor 23’… We will put forward our points, and will continue to do so. And we will repeat our demands.” Earlier, another G-23 leader, Manish Tewari, had taken a dig at the induction into the Congress of former JNU student leader, Kanhaiya Kumar. But the most important factor is the credibility of the opposition as an alternative to the organizationally super strong BJP to challenge the saffron in the coming elections. The Opposition leaders of the 19 parties met on August 20 and there was big talk about launching movements between September 20 and 30, but this was not at all followed up.
