The Congress is facing problems on multiple fronts across the country. The party that is without a fulltime president for two years now, is seeing a rift in Chattisgarh and received another jolt a day after Luizinho Faleiro quit the party in Goa. The newest setback was not in Goa, but in Punjab where their pradesh chief Navjot Singh Sidhu resigned delivering a huge blow to the party in the State that is going to the polls along with Goa. Sidhu had taken charge of the party unit in Punjab in mid-July and his sudden resignation two months later will throw the entire party out of gear five months before the polls.
This is the second time within a fortnight that Punjab has been plunged into political turmoil. On September 18, Captain Amarinder Singh had put in his papers as Chief Minister and was replaced by Charanjit Singh Channi who was reportedly close to Sidhu. Even as the new chief minister was taking office, the party in-charge of Punjab had tweeted that Sidhu would be the face for the polls, which in Test cricket parlance essentially made Channi the night watchman batting the last overs of the day before the next morning, when a fresh batsman would come in at the fall of the wicket. It had appeared then that Sidhu had been mollified and that the Punjab Congress crisis was ended. It has just ignited again as perhaps Sidhu felt that his post-election chief ministerial ambitions could be impeded.
Speculation is that Sidhu was upset with some of the cabinet changes made by Channi where his inputs were ignored and so decided to step down from the post of State party president. So besides a night watchman, there was also a seasoned player at the other end waiting to make a claim for the top post should Congress win the polls and his loyalists were ignored from the cabinet. Sidhu learnt the hard way that he could not be the remote control of the government, and perhaps so decided to quit.
The discordant voices in the Congress are getting louder and harsher, and the party had better start listening to them before it gets too late for change. Former Union Minister Kapil Sibal, a member of the dissenting G-23, a few months ago had called for a resurgent Congress that needs to show it is active and in a mood to engage meaningfully. He had suggested organisational polls, widespread reforms at the central and State levels to show that the party is no longer ‘in a state of inertia’. What happened since then only underlines the importance and the urgency of what the Congress needs – a complete revamp of the organisation, not a piecemeal attempt that will leave gaps in the organisational structure allowing leakages. In the midst of the current crisis he said, ‘We are G-23, definitely not Ji Huzoor-23. We will keep raising issues,’a clear sign that this group will keep up the fight. Another member of this group has sought a meeting of the CWC to discuss the exits from the party.
Yet, what is happening in the Congress is that the old guard is not willing to let go of the power they once held and the new generation of leaders are desperately looking at occupying the space that their elders hold. Tired of waiting, some of the younger ones – Jyothiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasad to name just two – have quit the party. The Congress leadership has to find common ground where it can accommodate both and not one at the expense of the other. Simultaneously, both groups also need to understand and appreciate that each can contribute to the party’s success in its own way. The country’s main opposition party has to pull itself out of the rocks it has landed on and sail again.
