india

Updated: Aug 28, 2019 09:22 IST

Congress president Sonia Gandhi is soon expected to take a call on the new party chief in Haryana where former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda is up in arms against incumbent Ashok Tanwar.

Hooda has threatened to chalk out his own path if the change of guard in the poll-bound state does not take place immediately. He has already formed a 35-member committee of loyalists to suggest the future course of action.

There was intense speculation that Hooda would announce his own party at a public rally in Rohtak on August 18. However, he did not do so but put the Congress party on notice by criticising its stand on the abrogation of Article 370.

Sonia Gandhi held a meeting with party general secretary in-charge of Haryana Ghulam Nabi Azad on Tuesday. Azad later had an elaborate discussion with Hooda.

The Congress leadership is understood to have decided to replace Tanwar ahead of the assembly elections due in October-November this year. A party functionary said the leadership is unlikely to succumb to Hooda’s pressure tactics and name him the new state chief.

As a result, a compromise formula is being worked out according to which senior leader and former Union minister Kumari Selja could be given the reins of the party in Haryana and Hooda is likely to be named as the head of the campaign committee.

Selja is expected to be assisted by a few working presidents to accommodate different castes and combinations. Hooda’s son Deepender could be one of the working presidents.

Hooda, a prominent Jat face of Haryana, and Tanwar, a Dalit leader considered close to former party chief Rahul Gandhi, have been at loggerheads for a long time now. This bitter infighting has dearly cost the already faction-ridden Congress - in the Lok Sabha and assembly polls in 2014 or the just-concluded national elections.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) not only won seven out of the 10 Lok Sabha seats in 2014 but also went on to form the government in the subsequent assembly elections in October that year.

This was for the first that the BJP had formed the government in Haryana on its own since the state was carved out of Punjab on November 1, 1966. And in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, the BJP maintained its good run and won all the 10 seats in the state.

Since Tanwar’s appointment in February 2014, street fights between his supporters and those of Hooda have publicly embarrassed the Congress on many occasions and all efforts by the central leadership to set its house in order have failed.