Cosmetic changes in AICC rejig do nothing to make party look any better

Over a year after he took over as Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge finally effected a long awaited rejig of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) on Saturday (December 23). Yet, if the expectation from the exercise was one of drastic overhaul to replace the Grand Old Party’s infamous organisational inertia with fresh energy ahead of the Lok Sabha polls, the rejig fell grossly short of the mark.

Instead, the only thing Kharge seems to have achieved with the latest round of Congress’s musical chairs, is to reaffirm that though he may be his party’s first elected president in a quarter century, the control of the organisation remains firmly with the Gandhi family — or more particularly, with Rahul Gandhi.

Barring the inclusion of Sachin Pilot as party general secretary in charge of Chhattisgarh, relieving Priyanka Gandhi from her charge of Uttar Pradesh, and the exit veteran leader Tariq Anwar as party general secretary in-charge of Kerala, the reshuffle had nothing to write home about.

An unfortunate legacy

Kharge roped in “new” faces such as former J&K Congress chief Ghulam Ahmed Mir and former Raiganj MP Deepa Dasmunshi as party general secretaries. After a brief hiatus, socialist leader Mohan Prakash, a lateral entrant into the party and a Rahul Gandhi favourite, has made a comeback as an office bearer (in charge of Bihar). Former Gujarat Congress chief Bharatsinh Solanki and former Goa Congress chief Girish Chodankar, another Rahul acolyte, have also been brought to the AICC as state in-charges. Former state in-charges Bhakt Charan Das, Rajani Patil Manish Chatrath, and Harish Chaudhary have been benched, though sources say Chaudhary could be in line for a crucial appointment in Rajasthan.

However, neither the new appointments nor the exits portend a glide-path for organisational rejuvenation. What a majority, if not all, of the new appointments show is, in fact, Kharge’s inability — or unwillingness — to break Rahul’s stranglehold over the party organisation and, by extension, a failure to rid the Congress of the unfortunate legacy of Rahul’s brief stint as party chief, the hallmark of which was rewarding incompetence with upward mobility.

Unlike the expansion of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) that Kharge carried out in August, which saw several leaders, young and old, from the grassroots and from diverse regional, religious, caste and economic backgrounds get a seat at the party high-table, the AICC reshuffle was limited to cosmetic changes, none of which make the party look any better.

The UP challenge

The “big” change, exhaustively written about in several media reports, was Avinash Pande’s reassignment — from in-charge of Jharkhand to in-charge of Uttar Pradesh. How ominous a challenge Pande has been assigned needs no elaboration. The Congress’s fortunes in UP, a state that sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha, have been on a nosedive for three decades. Rahul, during his presidency of the Congress, had roped in Priyanka to reverse that slide. That Priyanka failed spectacularly in the only specific political task she has, thus far, been assigned by her party was evident when the Congress’s tally in the state assembly fell to just two seats in the 2022 UP Assembly polls, which the party had fought with her as the mascot. The UP rout was preceded by Rahul’s own defeat from his traditional Amethi seat in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.

After the humiliation of the UP Assembly election, instead of redoubling her efforts at reviving the party, Priyanka made a hasty retreat from the state just as Rahul did after losing Amethi. Now, Pande, who was booted out as the party’s in-charge of Rajasthan in the aftermath of Sachin Pilot’s failed coup against Ashok Gehlot in July-August 2021 and reassigned to Jharkhand where Congress leaders routinely complained about his lack of political heft, will handle the affairs of the state where the Congress will have to ride pillion to Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party in the Lok Sabha polls if it wants a fighting chance to retain its lone Lok Sabha seat – Sonia Gandhi’s Rae Bareli.

With the privilege afforded to her by her lineage, Priyanka will continue as a CWC member and party general secretary without portfolio, awaiting, as per Congress sources, a “larger” role in the organisation and its election war room.

Patronage of incompetence

To be fair to Pande, he isn’t the sole beneficiary of the Congress’s high command’s inexplicable patronage of incompetence and crippling failures. Jitendra Singh, Deepak Babaria (both general secretaries) and state in-charges Devender Yadav, Mohan Prakash, Chellakumar, Rajeev Shukla, and Sukhjinder Randhawa, too, are recipients of the same largesse.

Singh, a member of the Alwar royal family and former Lok Sabha MP, has previously served as the overseer of Congress’s decimation in Odisha and Assam and was, more recently, tasked with candidate selection for the party in Madhya Pradesh, where the Congress, even per Kharge and Rahul, lost a winning battle to the BJP. Singh will continue as the party’s in-charge of Assam and has now been given additional charge of MP. Randeep Surjewala, yet another Rahul favourite, who was assigned additional charge of Madhya Pradesh earlier this year as reward for performing reasonably well as the in-charge of Karnataka (one of only three state assemblies the Congress has won in recent years; Himachal Pradesh and Telangana being the other two), has been divested of his charge of MP and will be confined to Karnataka for now.

Chellakumar, who, as in-charge of Odisha, failed to bring any cohesion in the party’s outreach efforts, has now been assigned to the north-eastern states of Mizoram, Meghalaya, and Arunachal Pradesh. Similarly, Bharatsinh Solanki, after ensuring the Congress’s steady atrophy in his home state of Gujarat, has been given a leg up to serve as party in-charge of J&K, a state where the Congress has to strike a difficult balance with INDIA bloc partners National Conference and PDP in the Lok Sabha polls.

Yadav, who was roundly criticised by the party’s Uttarakhand leaders for mishandling Congress’s affairs in the state and presiding over the party’s 2022 Assembly poll defeat, has been assigned Punjab, another state where the party has been struggling to recover the ground it lost to the Aam Aadmi Party two years ago.

KC Venugopal, Rahul’s eyes and ears, will continue in his role as the all-powerful Congress general secretary (organisation), despite several party leaders, particularly from the Hindi-speaking states, imploring Kharge to replace him owing to his arrogance, lack of political understanding, and non-existent conversation skills. Congress sources say it was at Venugopal’s insistence that party warhorse Ramesh Chennithala couldn’t make the cut as general secretary in Kharge’s new team and has been roped in merely as an in-charge, though of the crucial state of Maharashtra, despite being senior-most leader among all general secretaries and in-charges appointed in Saturday’s rejig.

Befuddling appointments

Two other equally befuddling appointments feature in the reshuffle. The first is the reassigning of Manikrao Thakre as in-charge of Goa. Thakre’s previous organisational role was that of in-charge, Telangana, a state where he was credited of ensuring that an otherwise fractured party worked together with unity to register a stunning and rare Congress victory just earlier this month.

If Thakre’s new role as in-charge of the tiny state of Goa, adjoining his home state of Maharashtra, appears to be a case of penalising a senior leader who performed well in his previous task, the counterweight is Kharge’s decision to retain Sukhjinder Randhawa as the party in-charge of Rajasthan.

Randhawa was appointed Rajasthan in-charge a year ago and failed to accurately convey to the party high command the electoral ground realities in the desert state that the party lost earlier this month to the BJP. For this stellar achievement, Randhawa has been retained in his previous role instead of being held accountable for what went wrong in the state, just as former CM Ashok Gehlot was rehabilitated by Kharge a week back with a spot in the party’s National Alliance Committee that will negotiate seat sharing with INDIA partners or as Sachin Pilot was promoted to party general secretary after giving the central leadership over three years of steadily intensifying migraines with his tantrums.

Last December, just two months after Kharge took over as Congress president, he had read the riot act to the then members of the CWC and other party office bearers. Kharge’s message to the team he had inherited from Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi was a simple but firm departure from the established practices of the party — that non-performance, incompetence, or complacency will not be tolerated henceforth. In making his new team on Saturday, after a long wait for 14 months, Kharge has only shown he isn’t willing to walk that tough talk even if the recent Assembly poll results in the Hindi Heartland called for desperate measures for Congress’s rejuvenation.