Welcome Cong leadership’s assurance, says Pilot
NEW DELHI: Former deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot said on Monday he chose to maintain the “dignity of the discourse” on the political situation in Rajasthan even as he was surprised by personal attacks on a few occasions.
“While a lot of unparliamentarily words were used, I have chosen to maintain the dignity of the discourse,” Pilot told HT.
After he appeared to have agreed to a truce following a meeting with former Congress president Rahul Gandhi, Pilot spoke to the media and said he thought certain issues had to be raised for the benefit of the party.
“We raised issues of principles before Congress leadership and welcome their assurance of time-bound redressal of our grievances,” Pilot said.
Stressing that he was not after any post, Pilot said it was the party that allotted a position and could take it back as well.
Pilot also spoke on the Congress’s decision to form a threemember panel to resolve issues raised by the rebels. “(Congress president) Sonia Gandhi Ji heard all our concerns and the governance issues that we raised. Formation of the threemember committee by the Congress
President is a welcome step,” he said.
Meanwhile, Congress leaders said a formula for Pilot’s return was being worked out, according to news agency PTI.
Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said “the political crisis in Rajasthan Congress stands resolved amicably by the intervention of none other than Rahul Gandhi himself”. “This is reflective of steadfast unity in
Congress party and the commitment of Congress legislators to never fall prey to BJP’S evil designs to defeat democracy.”
However, Congress leaders ruled out that Ashok Gehlot will be replaced as Rajasthan chief minister or Pilot will be reinstated as the party’s Rajasthan chief, a post which was filled immediately after the Congress sacked Pilot following his open revolt against Gehlot last month.
Over the years, the Congress has seen scores of rebellions and defections by party men more senior and prized than Sachin Pilot. But never in recent memory has a disaffected leader been as assiduously wooed as the former Rajasthan deputy chief minister after his revolt against Ashok Gehlot.
The Congress leadership’s peace overtures to Pilot -- including his latest meeting with Rahul Gandhi -- were unprecedented also in the light of the chief minister’s majority support in the legislature party: 100-plus loyalists against a mutinous 20-odd. Party spokespersons described Pilot as a “valued” colleague, as “family” while advocating dialogue to sort out the misunderstandings or grievances he has with Gehlot.
To be sure, this may also have been made possible by the lack of options before Pilot once it became clear he couldn’t get more legislators to switch to his camp.
Albeit on a much smaller scale, the clamor -- it seemed to lose steam after the initial burst on Twitter by Congress leaders of Pilot’s generation -- to not let him leave was reminiscent of 1999. That was when Sonia Gandhi quit as Congress president after the Sharad Pawar-led rebellion on the issue of her foreign origin. The only difference: she resigned, and Pilot was sacked from the positions he held for ignoring the party’s urgings to bury the hatchet.
To be fair, much of Pilot’s insubordination, if that’s the word, was unattributed. Personally remaining incommunicado, his was a proxy media offensive against Gehlot’s “excesses” to marginalise his faction.
A thread that ran common to these off-the-record conversations was the assertion that Pilot had no plans to cross over to the Bharatiya Janata Party; and that his battle was against the CM, not the party’s central command. It’s another matter that bipartisan observers saw circumstantial evidence flying in the face of his claim of no truck with the BJP.
Be that as it may, these averments, which could’ve been tactics to skirt disciplinary action or make the party complacent, distinguished l’affaire Pilot from past intraparty ferments. The Congress For Democracy (CFD), formed by Jagjivan Ram and HN Bahuguna before the 1977 elections, was a frontal denouncement of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. Before that, Chandra Shekhar, the original Young Turk of Indian politics, chose jail over a ministerial berth by refusing to back suspension of democratic freedoms under the draconian 1975 proclamation.
In the early phase of her long innings, Indira, then a relative neophyte, fought the powerful syndicate of Congress old guard in 1966-67 to become Prime Minister. The group that wanted her tamed included such stalwarts as Morarji Desai, K Kamaraj and S Nijalingappa. She had to wait till the 1969 presidential poll to put her “stamp of supremacy” on the party. The turning point came when her candidate, VV Giri defeated the syndicate’s nominee, Sanjeeva Reddy.
That’s now a bygone era. Today’s Congress is without even the truncated strength bequeathed to it by PV Narasimha Rao, who ran a good minority regime but paid scant attention to the health of the organisation he led by default after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. The period, made difficult by the 1992 Ayodhya episode, witnessed senior functionaries leaving the party in a veritable procession.
The breakaway group led by ND Tiwari had people like Arjun Singh and Natwar Singh in it. They rejoined the Congress in 1998 after Rao ceased to be its president, and his successor Sitaram Kesri was dispensed with to make room for Sonia Gandhi.
The Congress she inherited was a pale copy of the one headed by her husband. With over 400 seats in the Lok Sabha, Rajiv Gandhi appeared unstoppable when elected PM in 1984.
The sheen wore off fast as charges of graft (read Bofors) and other missteps (read Shah Bano; opening of temple doors in Ayodhya) which clouded the initiatives for which he’s remembered: advent of information technology; empowerment of Panchayati Raj institutions; warding off global pressure to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).
In the second half of Rajiv’s rule, his former defence and finance minister, VP Singh declared an all-out war, using the Bofors scam to marshal the entire Opposition against the Congress.