Congress president Sonia Gandhi has replaced Bihar Pradesh Congress chief Anil Sharma and the All-India Congress Committee in-charge Jagdish Tytler ahead of the Assembly elections, in the expectation that a change of leadership might give the party a lift.
The three-term MLA, Mehboob Ali Kaiser, who is the new PCC chief, and Union Minister for Social Justice and party general-secretary Mukul Wasnik, will now manage Bihar's affairs. Party sources told The Hindu that the changes were on the anvil for a while, as Mr. Sharma and Mr. Tytler had been at loggerheads for long.
Ms. Gandhi's decision to change the two top functionaries comes in the wake of about 100-odd PCC office-bearers and executive committee members offering to quit party posts.
As those who offered their resignations included members of the Legislative Assembly and the Legislative Council, and former PCC chiefs like Sadanand Singh, she could not afford to wait any longer. Mr. Kaiser was among those who had sought a change in the State leadership.
PCC office-bearers wrote to Ms. Gandhi, alleging that the party had been hijacked by “rejected people” from the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Lok Jan Shakti Party and the Janata Dal (United), apart from Bangalore-based contractors and businessmen.
Muslim-Dalit combine
Now, the party hopes that the new Muslim-Dalit combine will help it gain new constituents in poll-bound Bihar, especially as the prevailing mood appears to be to go it alone. Indeed, in the current Rajya Sabha elections, the Congress, a functionary said, decided “neither to accept support nor give support to any party.”
Its game plan, a Congress general secretary told The-Hindu , was to project Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, who is from Bihar, as the chief ministerial candidate, even though she would neither campaign nor step down from her job before the elections.
“We will, during our campaign, point out that it is the Congress which has given this country its first Dalit Speaker, and that too from Bihar.”
