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| June 19, 2000 | ||
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| CONGRESS Poll Vault On an unsure footing, Sonia has recently appointed pointsmen to ensure her re-election in forthcoming party polls By Lakshmi Iyer
Congress have prompted speculation in party circles that Sonia perhaps took lessons in conducting elections from the RJD chief. The elections in this case are the organisational polls in the Congress, a five-month-long process that was set in motion last week. Ordinarily, with her unchallenged supremacy, Sonia should have been sitting pretty. But her moves over the past week indicate she is not taking any chances. Making a mockery of the poll process, she appointed a few pointsmen to sign and seal her own re-election as the Congress chief in October.
Take the new Tamil Nadu unit chief E.V.K.S. Elankovan. His appointment came a few months before the Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) would have chosen its own leader. Chennai was not an isolated case. A couple of weeks earlier, the Andhra Pradesh pcc got a new chief: former Congress Working Committee member M. Satyanarayana Rao. Both these leaders had briefly flirted with political formations outside the Congress. Rao had once switched allegiance to the Congress (T) floated by the Arjun Singh-N.D. Tewari duo, while Elankovan had joined thespian Shivaji Ganesan's shortlived Tamizhagha Munnetra Mandram. There was a clear message in their elevation: 10 Janpath wanted them elected to the PCC posts. However, while Rao's appointment went unnoticed, that of little-known Elankovan's stirred a hornet's nest. Incumbent chief Tindivanam K. Ramamurthy refused to bow out quietly. He went ballistic, challenging his replacement on election eve and alleging that Sonia was a prisoner of a caucus led by Arjun Singh. These unilateral appointments shattered the myth of free and fair elections that Sonia and her colleagues had promised themselves in the Pachmarhi declaration two years ago by setting up an independent Central Election Authority (CEA) to supervise the party polls. The appointments also left CEA Chairman Ram Niwas Mirdha anguished. "I wish it had not been done," he says. "I have been repeatedly asking the AICC general secretaries not to make any changes in the PCCs as the election process is on." Mirdha, of course, is careful to absolve Sonia of any wrongdoing, saying she had no role in effecting the changes. "It is essentially the initiative of the enthusiastic AICC general secretaries," he says. At the same time, he asserts that the changes would not affect the election outcome as the last date for enrolling members had been May 31. "PCCs no longer matter. I have set up a parallel organisation. It is completely independent of the PCCs," he says. Senior Congress leaders view these appointments as part of Sonia's moves to hold the party captive. "She wants to ensure that there is no one to challenge her," a senior leader quips. Party insiders say her recent actions were prompted by two events in the past month: the Congress workers' meetings in Jhansi and Lucknow addressed by dissident leaders Jitendra Prasada and Rajesh Pilot. The enthusiastic response to the meetings ensured that Sonia could no longer be complacent about the lack of an alternative to her. The dissident leaders, she discovered, were not merely leveraging themselves for a re-election to the CWC but were engaged in raising alternative collective leadership. They had held discussions with senior leaders outside the CWC like Chandrajit Yadav, Mohammed Shafi Qureshi and former governors Bhishma Narain Singh and Baliram Bhagat. The thrust of the Prasada-Pilot campaign in Uttar Pradesh was on reviving inner party democracy and rejuvenating the Congress at the grassroots level. The declining importance of party workers was an apt theme to challenge the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Workers had become irrelevant ever since Indira Gandhi did away with party elections in 1972. That Sonia was rattled by the campaign became clear when she made feeble attempts for reconciliation. She deputed Arjun Singh to talk Prasada out of the Jhansi rally. When Singh failed, she extended "official patronage" to the rallies by despatching aicc General Secretary Motilal Vora as an observer. On the eve of the Jhansi rally she paid a half-hour visit to former prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, who she believes inspires the dissidents. While trying to make peace with the rebels, she worked hard to prove that she was still a crowd-puller by holding impressive rallies -- only in Congress-ruled states, of course. Simultaneously, she attempted to break the rival camp's unity. A day after he attended Prasada's conclave, Qureshi found himself appointed as the Jammu and Kashmir PCC chief. Sonia factotums, of course, brush aside any threat to her leadership. Vincent George, her all-powerful secretary, asserts, "At the most, there will be a dharti-pakad (the perennial candidate who fights every election) in the party who will contest against her." Such confidence in Sonia's abilities is not necessarily misplaced. After all, in the last three decades, the incumbent Congress president has always won hands down. |
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On
a recent visit to Bihar, Sonia Gandhi was received at the Patna airport by
Laloo Prasad Yadav. The three-minute meeting was held at the Congress
president's behest. While there is no official word about what transpired
during the tete-a-tete, subsequent developments in the