Why Congress is banking on senior leaders to fight its existential crisis

The Congress on Friday (March 8) declared its first list of 39 candidates for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. The party has fielded former party chief Rahul Gandhi once again from his current constituency of Wayanad in Kerala, without divulging if he would also make a bid to wrest his former Amethi seat in Uttar Pradesh back from the BJP’s Smriti Irani.

The list predominantly features candidates – 24 out of 39 – from the southern states of Karnataka, Telangana and Kerala (where 15 of the party’s 16 incumbent MPs have been fielded again; the lone exception being Thrissur MP TN Prathapan) and the Union Territory of Lakshadweep.

It is, however, the choice of candidates in Chhattisgarh, the lone Hindi-belt state for which the Congress named its picks, that perhaps provides both, a glimpse into the crisis-ridden party’s gambit for electoral recovery and a message to its own senior leaders across states of the expectation the party has from them in fighting its existential crisis.

Chhattisgarh gambit

The Congress has fielded former Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, who is currently the MLA from Patan constituency in Durg district, from the BJP stronghold of Rajnandgaon. Former Chhattisgarh cabinet minister Tamradhwaj Sahu, who lost the recent assembly polls from the Durg Gramin seat, has been fielded from Mahasamund. Incumbent MP Jyotsna Mahant, wife of Chhattisgarh Leader of Opposition Charan Das Mahant, has been fielded again from Korba.

With the exception of a bypoll back in 2007 when the late Devvrat Singh had won the Rajnandgaon seat for the Congress, the constituency has remained with the BJP ever since Chhattisgarh was carved out of Madhya Pradesh as a separate state in 2000. Former Chhattisgarh CM Raman Singh and his son Abhishek Singh had both represented Rajnandgaon in the Lok Sabha and the seat is currently held by the saffron party’s Santosh Pandey, who Baghel will now be up against.

In an unexpected rout, the Congress had lost the Chhattisgarh assembly polls under Baghel’s leadership in December last year. During the party’s internal assessments of the defeat, Baghel’s over-confidence was cited as one of the key reasons for the poll loss. Sources told The Federal that many local leaders as well as Sachin Pilot, the party in-charge for Chhattisgarh, had expressed the view that the top brass of the state unit, including Baghel, Sahu, Chhattisgarh Congress chief Deepak Baij and former deputy chief minister TS Singh Deo, must be made to contest the Lok Sabha polls.

Both Baghel and Deo, it is learnt, expressed their reluctance to fight the Lok Sabha polls; arguing that they would serve the party’s interest better if they are used extensively in campaigning for other candidates. It is not yet clear whether the party would also field Deo and Baij, the incumbent MP from Bastar who had also lost the December assembly polls, but by fielding Baghel and Sahu, sources say the Congress high command has indicated to other senior leaders in Chhattisgarh and other states that this was not the time to back out of a fight.

A concession that the leadership has made to Baghel and Sahu, both prominent OBC faces of the Congress, is to field them from constituencies where the communities they represent constitute a majority. As such, though both Baghel and Sahu hail from Durg district (the latter is also a former Lok Sabha MP from Durg), they have been fielded from Rajnandgaon and Mahasamund seats, respectively, which have an overwhelming population of backward castes.

Venugopal back in fray

The same yardstick of compelling senior leaders to fight the Lok Sabha battle appears to have been applied in the case of KC Venugopal, the Congress’ powerful organisational general secretary, who was also reportedly reluctant to face an electoral contest but caved in following, per Congress sources, a not-so-gentle nudge from party president Mallikarjun Kharge. Venugopal, who is currently a Rajya Sabha MP from Rajasthan with two years of his term still remaining, has been fielded from Kerala’s Alappuzha seat, which he had won in the 2009 and 2014 polls.

Known as one of Rahul’s closest aides in the Congress, Venugopal had opted out of the Lok Sabha fight in 2019 despite being the sitting Alappuzha MP and the seat eventually became the only one out of Kerala’s 20 constituencies that the Congress-led UDF coalition failed to win despite Rahul’s foray into the poll battle from the state’s Wayanad seat.

Though not an electoral warhorse by any stretch, Venugopal has emerged as one of the party’s frontline leaders by virtue of his proximity to Rahul and the position he holds within the organisation. Curiously, if Venugopal wins Alappuzha, the Congress will lose the Rajya Sabha berth he currently holds to the BJP given the saffron party’s majority in the Rajasthan assembly.

Thus, by fielding Venugopal, the party has indicated its willingness to sacrifice a seat in the Rajya Sabha if doing so can shore up its strength in Parliament’s Lower House, where for two consecutive terms, it hasn’t had the numbers to even stake claim for the post of Leader of Opposition.

All eyes on next meet

The Congress’ election committee is now scheduled to meet on March 11 to finalise the next list of candidates. The deliberations on March 11 are likely to be for the vast political landscape of the Hindi Heartland, where the Congress is pitted directly against the BJP in a large chunk of seats unlike many constituencies featured in the first list (with the exception of those from Karnataka) where the party has as its principal rival the Left Front (in Kerala) or regional players such as the BRS in Telangana and state-centred parties of Meghalaya, Nagaland and Sikkim.

Among states for which candidates are likely to be decided at the March 11 meeting are Uttar Pradesh (where the Congress will contest on 17 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats as an ally of the Samajwadi Party), Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana and Gujarat, among others, party sources said.

Will big guns take plunge?

In states like Rajasthan and MP, there is a demand within the party that top rung leaders such as former chief ministers Ashok Gehlot, Digvijaya Singh, Kamal Nath, former deputy CM Sachin Pilot, former Union ministers Arun Yadav, Kumari Selja, Jitendra Singh and a host of others must be fielded by the party. Similarly, the UP Congress has been demanding that Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi must be fielded from the Amethi and Rae Bareli constituencies, respectively.

Insiders say Gehlot, Digvijaya, Kamal Nath, Selja and Yadav are “not keen” on contesting the Lok Sabha polls and have offered various reasons to justify their stand. Gehlot and Nath, for instance, want the party to grant tickets to their sons Vaibhav Gehlot and sitting Chhindwara MP Nakul Nath, while Digvijaya, a serving Rajya Sabha member like Venugopal, wants the party to field younger candidates in a bid to develop future leadership. Selja, on the other hand, wants to focus on Haryana politics where she, along with Rajya Sabha MP Randeep Surjewala and former minister Kiran Chaudhary, has been involved in an intra-party war of brinkmanship against former Chief Minister Bhupinder Hooda.

Suspense over top leaders

It remains to be seen whether the Congress leadership prevails upon these leaders to take on the unenviable challenge of facing the BJP at the hustings. For Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul and Priyanka, themselves leading figures of the party high command, it is also a question of practicing what they wish to preach to their senior party colleagues.

Kharge, it is learnt, wants to be left free for campaigning for the party he now leads and not being tied down to his erstwhile Lok Sabha constituency of Gulbarga, in Karnataka, as a candidate. Sources say the Congress president, whose son Priyank Kharge is already a minister in the state, wants the party ticket from Gulbarga to be given to another relative.

With Sonia Gandhi quitting electoral politics and entering Parliament as a Rajya Sabha member, expectation is that Priyanka would fill her mother’s shoes as the Congress’ face in Rae Bareli, the lone Lok Sabha seat that the party had managed to win from UP in 2019.

The party also wants Rahul to return to Amethi to avenge the humiliation he faced in 2019 when he lost the family turf to Smriti Irani. The Gandhi siblings, however, say party sources, are yet to give a clear assurance of heeding to the aspirations of their supporters in the two constituencies despite the comfort of the Samajwadi Party’s support for their candidacy.