Congress right to back Rawat
Senior Congress leader Harish Rawat’s unhappiness with the central party leadership could not have been more apparent than when he, in a series of tweets, earlier this week made it clear that he would keep his options open since the top leadership was not reining in those who were creating organisational difficulties in the state Congress on the eve of Assembly elections in Uttarakhand. The former CM was hinting at the unsolicited activities of the greenhorn from outside the state who is the central leadership’s point-person for the state. Since Mr Rawat fired his sharp-arrow tweets, Rahul Gandhi — who for all practical purposes behaves as the surrogate party president — convened a meeting with him and other seniors of the state Congress in which it was decided that Mr Rawat would head the party’s election campaign committee.
This is less than his ambition to be named the party’s CM candidate, but the decision does foreground him. This is a move on from days earlier when Mr Rawat, who is the most significant Congress leader in the hill state and is generally held in esteem, was treated as being one in the crowd. The central leadership might do well to pull back the said greenhorn if they mean to reinforce Mr Rawat’s status.
Challenging the ruling BJP is no doubt an uphill task. While faction-ridden, the party still commands huge resources. It also controls the government machinery. It is hard to think of any one leader in state Congress other than the former CM, around whom an effective team can be built to take on the saffron party. If the Congress high command can facilitate this, there could be a prize to win. If not, in Uttarakhand, too, the party can head the Punjab way.
Why the Gandhi siblings are all too often seen to let things boil over before attempting a real or imagined salvage act is hard to understand. In fact, this is an apposite subject for discussion in the CWC. In the present instance, if they have in mind some sort of caste-based political engineering that can benefit the party in poll-bound Uttar Pradesh next door, even if this risks producing indifferent outcomes in Uttarakhand, that would be amateurish thinking. To use a cricketing metaphor, it is prudent to send your best batsmen up the order.