RAHUL RUNNING CONGRESS WITH HIS OWN AMAR, AKBAR, ANTHONY

Former Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot (67) was reluctant to leave the state politics seeing prospects of once again heading the government, but he has emerged today as the most trusted and key man of Congress President Rahul Gandhi not only as the new organisational general secretary but also as part of his core team for the political management.

Never before one given the overall charge of the organisation was also involved in the day-to-day political management that Gehlot is handling. In fact, Rahul has three A's up his sleeves as his political advisers. Besides Ashok Gehlot, two others are: Ahmed Patel (68) and Ghulam Nabi Azad (69). They remind the 1977 Hindi movie Amar, Akbar, Anthony as a new team that today rules the roost.

Rahul has not yet set up the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the key body for political decision, even after about three months of the AICC plenary session that empowered him to constitute it instead of holding elections for half of its members. Instead, he is running the party with this core team of the trio as his political advisers on every issue. Senior party leaders say Rahul may prefer to have this collective to advise him instead of appointing a political secretary.

He spoke of promoting the youth even in the plenary session held in Delhi, but there is no young face in his core team that he has picked up from the experienced hands as he has apparently realised that only the experienced can guide him in running the party without any break with the continuity.

Gehlot is no new face for the national politics as he has been one of the AICC general secretaries before going back to Rajasthan to form the government. Ahmed Patel, the political secretary of Sonia Gandhi, was picked up by Rahul as he knew the Congress leaders in every state personally and better than anybody else, defying the media writing his political obituary in the organisation after Sonia stepped down as the party president.

Congress insiders say whenever Rahul rushed to Sonia for advice, she always referred him to Ahmed Patel and that is how he realised that he can't have any better political adviser than his mother's trusted aide for almost 15 years.

The same capability he found in Ghulam Nabi Azad, the leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, for the personal contacts he maintains with the Congress leaders across the country as the AICC general secretary for many terms. Azad's talent was further recognised by Rahul from the way he handled the Karnataka crisis after the truncated Karnataka Assembly elections to install the Congress government.