Despite attending two rallies of her party in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region last week, Congress President Sonia Gandhi chose to skip Nagpur, considered the heart of not only Vidarbha but also the entire central India.
According to sources in state unit of the Congress, Gandhi avoided visiting Nagpur because of the intense infighting within the party’s Nagpur unit. Among the two rallies attended by the Congress president on Friday, one was to seek votes for Praful Patel, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) candidate from Bhandara-Gondia, and the other for Congress candidate Mukul Wasnik from Ramtek constituency. The NCP is a constituent of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre.
Local Congress leaders are finding it hard to explain why Gandhi chose to share the dais with NCP boss Sharad Pawar at a rally organised for Patel, but skipped the meeting of Union Minister of State for New and Renewable Energy Vilas Muttemwar, the Congress candidate from Nagpur.
The answer is quite obvious, say sources in the state Congress. Patel enjoys a good personal rapport with Gandhi; and infighting in the Nagpur Congress deserves a separate chapter in the long history of groupism in the Congress camp in Maharashtra.When Sonia Gandhi addressed a public meeting in Mumbai in June last year, a section of party supporters led by state Industry Minister Narayan Rane raised slogans against the then chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, causing major embarrassment for the Congress president.
