india

Updated: Mar 11, 2020 06:29 IST

The announcement of senior leader Jyotiraditya Scindia’s resignation from Congress has once again shone a spotlight on the challenges facing the party, which has been struggling to recoup from indecisive leadership since the 2019 general elections, despite subsequent electoral wins at the state level.

Soon after Congress was decimated in the Lok Sabha elections, the grand old party was plunged into a leadership crisis when Rahul Gandhi resigned from the post of party president on May 25, during a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC).

For 77 days, the top post remained vacant. CWC members exhorted Gandhi to take back his resignation, but he refused to do so. On August 10, 2019, CWC finally nominated Sonia Gandhi to take over the position and pull the party out of this particular crisis.

Indecision has been a serious and recurring problem for Congress.

In his resignation letter, Scindia wrote that the path to his exit had been laid more than a year ago, which is likely to be a reference to not just the party’s decision to appoint Kamal Nath chief minister of Madhya Pradesh (MP), but also to Congress failing to appoint a new state president. Nath currently holds both posts because the party has not been able to select a name to replace Nath as its state unit chief.

In Karnataka, Dinesh Gundu Rao has submitted his resignation from the post of state unit president to the Congress high command, taking moral responsibility for the party’s poor show in the by-elections held in December 2019. Former chief minister Siddaramaiah also stepped down as leader of Congress Legislature Party (CLP).

After a series of discussions, Congress’s central leadership had almost finalised former minister and key troubleshooter DK Shivakumar as the new Karnataka unit chief, but the decision has been put on hold as Siddaramaiah has pitched Lingayat leader MB Patil for the post.

Similarly, the state chiefs of Telangana (Uttam Kumar Reddy) and Odisha (Niranjan Patnaik) resigned from their posts soon after the Lok Sabha elections, but the party leadership is still struggling to find their replacements.

In Punjab, the central leadership has failed to resolve differences between chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh and his former minister Navjot Singh Sidhu, who resigned in July 2019. Where decisions have been taken, they seem to have cost Congress dearly. For example, in Haryana, Ashok Tanwar was removed as state unit chief weeks before the Assembly elections after six years as president of the Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee. Senior leader Kumari Selja replaced him and election management was handed over to former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda who brought the party within striking distance of ousting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from power.

In Maharashtra, Congress’s leadership was in disarray with many senior leaders, including Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil and Harshwardhan Patil, defecting to the BJP and others, such as Sanjay Nirupam, refusing to campaign for the party. When Assembly election results were announced, Congress had dropped to fourth position and it was forced to cede its ‘big brother’ role to Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), which formed a three-party alliance between NCP, Shiv Sena and Congress.

Congress’s performance in Delhi was worse in Delhi, where the rudderless party failed to open its account in last month’s Assembly elections. The two states where infighting doesn’t appear to have affected Congress are Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. All eyes will now be on the stability of these 2 state governments. Aurangzeb Naqshbandi