Congress members may differ on whether party president Sonia Gandhi or her son, vice president Rahul Gandhi, should be Leader of the party in the Lok Sabha, but most are coming round to the view that a Gandhi must be the face of the party, as a consensus would emerge only on one of them. This, despite the fact that the Congress faced an ignominious defeat in the recently concluded Lok Sabha polls, plummeting to its lowest ever score of 44, less than 10 per cent of the strength of the house.
Conversations with a cross section in the party suggests that a majority in the party prefer Ms Gandhi as their Leader in the Lok Sabha; however, they add that if she does not want to take on the post as she is already the Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson, then party vice president Rahul Gandhi must now lead from the front. Their argument is that since he was the face of the party in the general elections and there has been no change in his status as the next leader of the party he cannot now “shy away” from taking on the responsibility when the party is facing tough times – unless he actually steps aside.
“The political leadership of the party has to be the face of the party to the nation as well,” party spokesperson Shashi Tharoor said at a party briefing on Friday, summing up the current sentiment in the party.
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The majority view is that if someone like former parliamentary minister Kamal Nath were to become the party’s Leader in the Lok Sabha, it would send a confused signal about the leadership. As things stand, many people in the party see the dual leadership that prevailed in the Congress — Dr Manmohan Singh as PM and Ms Gandhi as party president — over the last decade being part of the problem.
The effort, therefore, now is to preserve Mr. Gandhi’s image and start rebuilding it, especially by the senior leaders: On Saturday, Kerala Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, asked by journalists in Thiruvananthapuram about the growing voices of dissent against Mr. Gandhi said he should not be singled out for the Congress' debacle in the Lok Sabha elections: “It is not proper to single out any particular leader for the debacle. The party takes collective responsibility in victories as well as defeat. The outcome of the elections has already been evaluated by the party in that sense.”
Mr Chandy’s remarks came even as Mr Gandhi went Baduan in Uttar Pradesh where two Dalit girls were raped and murdered recently, as the first step after the elections to begin the process of re-connecting with the people.
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Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh also said recently, “It is Sonia who united the Congress and led us to two consecutive LS poll victories… there is no disconnect between Rahul and senior Congress leaders.”
The effort is clearly to protect the Gandhis and instead blame the functioning of the government — the policy paralysis, the inability to check inflation that taken together angered the middleclass and youth, and the failure to communicate that the welfare programmes were being driven by the UPA that damaged its chances in rural India.
Indeed, across the country, after the initial outbursts, the Congress is also now in damage control mode. On Saturday, senior Congress leader G.K. Vasan called a halt to the battle between loyalists of former union finance minister P. Chidambaram and factions pitted against him over who should take responsibility for the party's poll debacle, appealing to cadres to desist from going to media on the issue.
On May 29, Karti Chidambaram, former MP K.S. Alagiri and several other Chidamabaram loyalists had alleged that the party was handed down “an unexpected defeat,” in TN as the state leadership had not been “functioning properly”: they demanded that B S Gnanadesikan should quit as Tamil Nadu Congress Committee (TNCC) president.