A jittery Congress in Vidarbha saw 90 members including, five senior leaders who have been with the party through thick and thin since the days of Indira Gandhi leave the party on the Vidarbha statehood issue.
Panic buttons are being pressed and efforts have started to keep the flock together. Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee President, Ranjit Deshmukh has maintained that the house is still in order and such dissidence is neither new to the party nor to politics.
However, more meetings are being held at district places as well as at Zilla Parishad level.
A two-day long workshop on Panchayat Raj and the 73rd Constitutional Amendment for all Zilla Parishad and Panchayat Samiti members was organised at a resort close to Nagpur instead of in the Sarpanch Bhavan, the venue for previous such meets.
Now there are talks of taking participating members for a dip at the holy Kumbh at Nashik. This comes at a time when the ZP is facing a severe fund crunch and questions are being raised about the need for the extravagance.
In their haste to get out of the city and get on with the job, the Congress forgot to invite the local MLA, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader, Ramesh Bang and the entire NCP in the ZP boycotted the event.
Labour Minister and Guardian Minister of Nagpur District, Satish Chaturvedi, who is known to have been able to keep his job only because of the intervention of the Congress High Command when the Chief Minister of Maharashtra was changed from Vilasrao Deshmukh to Sushil Kumar Shinde, addressed the meet.
Interestingly, while former Union Ministers, N K P Salve and Vasant Sathe, who resigned from the primary membership of the Congress last week, are camping at Delhi at the moment, newspaper baron, Banwarilal Purohit, who also left the party along with them, has been moving across Vidarbha touching base with more likeminded Congressmen.
The results are visible as 90 Congress members quit the party to pledge support to the statehood issue.
Addressing a press conference, former Maharashtra Minister, Shankarrao Gedam announced that Secretary of All India Sevadal Biradari, Keshavrao Shende, former MLC, Pundalikrao Bhanarkar, former MLA, Yadavrao Deogade and former spokesman of the MPCC, Dr. Govind Verma had left the party along with him to join the separate Vidarbha movement.
A meeting of what is being tentatively called the Vidarbha Pradesh Sangharsha Samiti or Congress is scheduled to be held on September 2 at the Vasantrao Deshpande Hall here.
The meeting will be politically significant, as it will demonstrate the strength of the dissidents as also their commitment to the cause of a separate Vidarbha state.
The name of the new separate Vidarbha organisation will also be decided at the meeting and a membership drive launched subsequently.
