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THE NATION:
CONGRESS
Royal
Challenge
Dissident
leader Jitendra Prasada seems to be weighing all options before throwing
his hat in the ring for the party president's post
By
Lakshmi Iyer
Congress
elections are usually a biennial or triennial ritual: results are pre-concluded,
no "non-official" candidate enters the fray and elective posts
tend to go uncontested. Last week senior party leader Jitendra Prasada
breached the widely accepted compact on the on-going poll process in his
party. Eleven days before nominations for the office of the Congress president
opened, Prasada very nearly threw his hat into the ring. Maybe not quite.
He simply hinted at a tantalising possibility of a contest against the
Nehru-Gandhi dynasty for the top party post-the first time in years.
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| Sonia
braces herself for the contest ahead |
Prasada,
the 62-year-old scion of the Shahjahanpur royal family, held out his promise
in his fifth letter to Congress Central Election Authority (CEA) Chairman
Ram Niwas Mirdha complaining about election irregularities.
What had
the Congress circles in a stir was his complaint that the revised poll
schedule gave very little canvassing time to anyone wishing to contest
the Congress presidency. This was interpreted as Prasada's desire to stand.
Surely, Dissident No.1 had not raised the spectre of a contest without
identifying a candidate in his mind-either himself or a hand-picked acolyte.
At one level,
"Jeeti bhai", as Prasada is popularly known in party circles,
is eminently qualified to stand against Sonia Gandhi. He was the first
Congress leader to talk of the need to revive the party organisation after
its 1999 electoral rout. The four-term Shahjahanpur MP has also been vice-president
(1997-98) of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) and served both Rajiv
Gandhi and P.V. Narasimha Rao as political secretary.
At the end
of the week, Prasada fuelled more speculation. He followed up his missive
to Mirdha with a four-page open letter to partymen, including 9,154 delegates-1,055
of the AICC and 8,099 of the Pradesh Congress Committees (PCC)-who make
up the electoral college that chooses the party president.
Steering
clear of any reference to his candidature, the Uttar Pradesh leader spoke
of higher ideals and the need to empower partymen via party elections.
He called for enabling party workers to "act without any apprehension
of reprisal from vested interests, coteries, faction leaders, sycophants
and time-servers". He warned against relying on negative votes (as
in Gujarat recently) and mooted collective leadership to "combat
and defeat BJP's ideological thievery". The signal to 10 Janpath
could not have been missed.
By hedging
the chances of his entering the fray, Prasada has clearly flummoxed Sonia's
managers such as her private secretary Vincent George and Arjun Singh.
Nevertheless, her aides have ordered a rigorous manipulation of the electoral
college. Distrusting their own District Returning Officers and Pradesh
Returning Officers, they have opted to personally vet the voters' list
and the delegates through a loyalty test.
They have
prepared a checklist of dependable PCC presidents and chief ministers.
Digvijay Singh, Ashok Gehlot and Vilasrao Deshmukh, chief ministers of
Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra, have been counted out.
"Whoever
contests against Soniaji will not even get 12 votes. We will see that
Prasada does not get elected even to the CWC," brags a Sonia camp
follower. Manipulation of the voters' list somehow does not bother Prasada
supporters. "We have done our homework. As long as delegates are
Congressmen and not Italians, why should we worry?" asks one of them.
Dissidents
are confident of a fair deal from Mirdha. Though helpless against the
might of Sonia aides, the CEA chairman in a quaint way may redeem his
honour by not allowing them to get away scot-free. Prasada backers are
also banking on the widespread discontent provoked by the elections. Senior
leaders across the country are in touch with each other to help anyone
contesting against Sonia poll at least 25 per cent vote. If you can't
win, symbolism will do.
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