Congress revival plan: G23 leaders step up pressure on Gandhi family

Party, they say, must rest its faith in the collective leadership - in a more representative CWC

As Congress leaders Manish Tewari and Anand Sharma met President Sonia Gandhi, the ginger group - or the so-called G23 – kept up pressure on the Gandhi family and, without spelling it out, said it was impossible to accept Rahul Gandhi as éminence grise in the party.

“Appoint a new Congress working committee (CWC) with exactly 24 members, form the parliamentary board from among those 24 members which should be empowered, and also hold a new election committee which should ‘look’ like an elected committee,” said a G23 member, who added this is what all leaders of its group meeting the Congress president are conveying to her.

Privately, leaders were more frank.

Said a G23 member: “No one will question Mrs Gandhi (for an electoral loss). But the children?  No semblance of democratic functioning. They took decisions relating to the party and the government without asking anyone, except random advisors: removing Amarinder Singh, installing Charanjit Singh Channi, appointing Navjot Singh Sidhu. Some decisions were baffling for others who were also facing elections: why was Channi announced the chief ministerial face, not Amarinder? After all, it was Amarinder who had won the elections for Punjab in 2017, not Channi. Priyanka Gandhi announced giving 40 per cent seats to women in Uttar Pradesh (UP). But why not in all elections, all over India? If this was good politics in UP, it should be good for the rest of the country as well. In any case, of the 399 Congress candidates, 387 lost their deposit.”

Party leaders say the situation is not akin to 1999 when Sharad Pawar was expelled from the Congress and formed the Nationalist Congress Party when V P Singh announced the formation of the Jan Morcha: simply because the leaders are realistic enough to recognise that there is no leader of that stature in the party any more. But in the absence of a single leader, the party, they say, must rest its faith in the collective leadership: in the form of a more representative CWC.

For this, the single unstated premise is that those who are currently taking decisions must be stripped of their powers. On the shortlist are party General-Secretary K C Venugopal and Spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala.

Party leaders say ahead of the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections in 2021, a committee was set up to negotiate seat-sharing between the Congress and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK). At the same time, Oommen Chandy and Surjewala conducted parallel discussions. DMK leader M K Stalin could make out that the Congress had several different opinions on how many seats it wanted to contest (and could win) and left the party with a ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ option of 21 seats, not even the 30 it sought; in 2011, when the party was in power at the Centre, it was able to wrest 63 seats from the DMK. It contested 41 in 2016.

What appears to irk the group the most is the power wielded by Rahul, but at the same time lack of access to him to cite their concerns. Current minister in the Union government, Jyotiraditya Scindia, confided in one member of the group that he was unable to meet Rahul for nearly two years. When he finally got a call through to him, all Rahul had to say to him was: "If you want to meet me about anything else, I’ll give you time. If you want to meet me about the Congress, you should meet the Congress president".

At the last meeting of the CWC which met to analyse the losses in the Assembly elections, Rahul is reported to have said: "I will deliver Gujarat to you, don’t worry". Said a member of the G23: "A day after the Assembly election results, Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Gujarat. Rahul needs to go, camp there, and then tell us he will deliver Gujarat".