Determined Rahul plans to turn the heat on Congress dissidents
All the 23 Congress dissenters, who shot off the controversial letter to party boss Sonia Gandhi ahead of the acrimonious CWC meeting, are going to face the music. Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi is not going to yield to them, and rather he can come up with “surprising” decisions in the days to come.
Rahul Gandhi is learnt to have made up his mind to gradually sideline these dissenters within the party, apart from taking some strict action which is understood to be in the offing. It is also clear that Sonia Gandhi will not interfere in the decisions by Rahul Gandhi.
Sources say that the former Congress chief is in no mood to create any new posts in the party. There is no possibility of the organizational set up being changed with addition of new posts. No post of vice president will be created in the Congress. However, new appointments on the post of general secretary will surely be made. Only a couple of dissenters may be given some organisational responsibility. Upset over the turf war in the party, Rahul Gandhi has also given a clear warning to the state leaders\, who are trying to run parallel systems of the organization and questioning the leadership on one occasion or the other. According to sources, the leaders who did not sign the letter, but missed no chances to instigate the dissenters are also on the radar of Rahul Gandhi. The controversial letter is believed to be a blessing in disguise for Rahul, as the former Congress chief seized the opportunity to tighten his grip on the party. He managed to turn the tables on the 20-odd seniors by questioning the timing of the letter when the Congress was at its weakest and Sonia Gandhi was not keeping well.
The Gandhi scion succeeded in his strategy to show the seniors’ action as something which amounted to a great disservice to the crises-ridden party.
Most of the leaders who wrote to Sonia Gandhi do not have any mass base, and this fact gave Rahul Gandhi more confidence to counter them in the CWC meeting.
Moreover, most of these leaders are at the fag-end of their political careers as well. When Rahul Gandhi had resigned as Congress president after the poll defeat in 2019, he was under the impression that all party office-bearers will also put in their papers. But nothing like that happened, much to his disappointment.
Hence, his plan to strengthen his grip on the party had come a cropper. At the time, Rahul preferred to be silent thinking it to be the best policy at that point of time. But he did not change his politics and continued to attack Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He was neutral in terms of party-related issues for some time. He was deeply hurt after the fall of the Congress governments in Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh. His feedback then was that the governments did not survive due to their own weaknesses. But after Ashok Gehlot started fighting to save his government in Rajasthan, Rahul also got active and started taking decisions on the issues related to the desert state. Rahul was keeping a close watch on senior leaders and took note of their silence on the entire development in Rajasthan. But he remained silent waiting for the opportune moment to vent his anger.