CONGRESS CLOSES RANKS FOR POLLS
Key appointments made to prevent desertions to rebel Ajit Jogi’s Janata Congress Chhattisgarh
After months of talking, the Congress in Chhattisgarh has started an organisational revamp with an eye on the assembly polls scheduled at the end of the year. The present set of appointments, after All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary P.L. Punia took charge of the state, seems aimed more at securing the party’s flanks against desertions in favour of former party leader and former chief minister Ajit Jogi’s party—Janata Congress Chhattisgarh (JCC)—and taking on the BJP’s three-term chief minister Raman Singh. Jogi quit the Congress in June 2016 and immediately announced his new party.
For starters, Jogi’s legislator wife Renu has been replaced as deputy Congress Legislature Party leader by Kawasi Lakma, a tribal MLA from Bastar. Besides Lakma, two other former Jogi loyalists, Shiv Dehariya and Ramdayal Uike, representing the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, respectively, have been inducted as working presidents in the state unit. The three have been accommodated to pre-empt desertions to the JCC.
The party, under its new president Rahul Gandhi, also appointed Charan Das Mahant as head of the campaign committee in the state. Mahant is seen as close to party veteran Digvijaya Singh. Incumbent state unit chief Bhupesh Baghel, against whom the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) proceeded in a sex CD case in December 2017, and leader of opposition T.S. Singhdeo have both been retained.
However, while these and other appointments cover the tribal community, Scheduled Castes, Thakurs and backward classes, Brahmins have been ignored. A few Brahmin leaders, such as Amitesh Shukla, Ravindra Chaubey and Rajendra Tiwari, have been included in a 33-member election campaign committee, but there is no Brahmin occupying a prominent party post. To add to this, the retention of Baghel, who is widely seen as anti-Brahmin, is not helping matters.
Three times in succession, the Congress has failed to bridge the narrow gap in vote share with the BJP—2.6 per cent in the 2003 elections, 1.7 per cent in 2008 and 0.75 per cent in 2013. Will 2018 be any different?