Flurry of new inductions: Boost and worry for Congress ahead of LS polls

Netas hopping from one political party to another is a routine affair in poll season and, for the past decade, the Congress party has been the worst victim of this crisis of attrition, having lost a bevy of leaders cutting across states to the BJP and other parties. In a reversal of fortune, however, Wednesday (March 20) marked a rare occasion when the crisis-ridden Congress inducted four prominent leaders from as many states in quick succession and asserted that many more were in queue to jump onto its bandwagon in the run up to the seven-phase Lok Sabha polls, which is scheduled to begin from April 19.

The new inductees include a sitting MLA and BJP whip in the Jharkhand Assembly, a once feared Bahubali-like politician from Bihar’s Seemanchal region who has remoulded himself as a Robin Hood-like messiah for oppressed communities, a sitting Lok Sabha MP from Uttar Pradesh whose Muslim identity had made him victim of a BJP counterpart’s vile abuse on the floor of Parliament and, lastly, a former two-term MP and prominent Dogra Hindu leader from Jammu and Kashmir whose controversial past and outspoken ways may give the Congress some discomfort in the coming days.

Consolidating in Jharkhand

Jai Prakash Bhai Patel, a three-term BJP MLA from Jharkhand’s Mandu assembly seat, joined the Congress at a time when the party’s ruling alliance with Shibu Soren JMM has been on the edge since the arrest of Chief Minister Hemant Soren. Rumours of the BJP trying to topple the JMM–Congress coalition government in Jharkhand have swirled without a pause for months. Just the other day, the alliance and JMM, in particular, had received a major jolt with Hemant’s sister-in-law and party MLA Sita Soren joining the BJP. Sita’s defection came days after the Congress also lost its lone sitting Lok Sabha MP from Jharkhand’s Singhbhum, Geeta Koda, to the saffron party.

The Congress hopes that Patel’s induction would strengthen the party and its alliance in Jharkhand’s Chhota Nagpur region, where the Mandu MLA’s family holds some sway. Patel’s father, late Tek Lal Mahto, was a senior JMM leader and a prominent face of the Jharkhand statehood movement, alongside Shibu Soren. Congress sources say the party is also considering fielding Patel from the Hazaribagh Lok Sabha seat, a BJP bastion that has elected a Congress MP only twice – in 1971 and 1984 – since 1952.

The Congress was also in talks with former BJP veteran Yashwant Sinha to contest from the seat he had won thrice in the past. However, the 86-year-old Sinha, whose son and incumbent Hazaribagh MP Jayant Sinha was replaced by Manish Jaiswal as the BJP candidate for the upcoming polls, turned down the offer due to indifferent health, The Federal has learnt.

Betting on Danish Ali

The other probable Congress candidate from Hazaribagh is Barkagaon MLA Amba Prasad. Prasad, like Patel, belongs to the OBC community and draws her political legacy from her father Yogendra Sao, a leader whose popularity extended beyond the family pocket borough of Barkagaon.

While Patel’s induction into the Congress surprised many given that he was the BJP’s whip in the Jharkhand Assembly, Amroha MP Danish Ali’s entry into the Grand Old Party was in the making ever since Mayawati expelled him from the Bahujan Samaj Party some months ago for “anti-party activities”. Ali is learnt to have been personally invited into the Congress by Rahul Gandhi, who was the first prominent political leader to visit him at his Delhi residence last December hours after BJP MP Ramesh Bidhuri hurled a volley of abuses at the Amroha MP during a debate in the Lok Sabha.

That Ali would eventually switch to the Congress had become even more apparent when the party, during seat-sharing negotiations with Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party, insisted on getting the Amroha seat in its kitty of 17 of UP’s 80 constituencies where the Congress will now field INDIA bloc candidates. The Amroha MP had also joined Rahul Gandhi’s recently concluded Manipur to Maharashtra Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra and now, with his formal induction into the party, the Congress has also gained a prominent Muslim face and that too from a state as electorally crucial as Uttar Pradesh.

Inducting Bihar strongman

Next on the Congress’s roster of inductions on Wednesday was Rajesh Ranjan aka Pappu Yadav. Once a feared bahubali politician embroiled in a series of criminal cases, including the 1998 murder of CPM politician Ajit Sarkar, Yadav is a prized catch for the Congress. The former five-term MP, whose political influence spreads across Bihar’s economically impoverished Seemanchal, has in recent years recast himself as a Robin Hood-like figure across the parliamentary constituencies of Purnea, Supaul, Katihar, Saharsa, Madhepura, Araria and Kishanganj.

A mercurial leader, the 56-year-old Yadav has had past political affiliations with late Ram Vilas Paswan’s LJP and Lalu Yadav’s RJD, though he had also been elected to the Lok Sabha as an independent candidate when these parties did not give him a ticket. Though Yadav’s wife, Ranjeet Ranjan, had joined the Congress back in 2009, he had charted his own political path, having founded the Jan Adhikar Party (Loktantrik) in 2015 after being expelled from the RJD. The JAP may not have won any seats in the three elections – two Assembly and one Lok Sabha – for which it fielded candidates but Yadav continued to be a key political figure in the state.

“Over the past 15 years, he has completely transformed his politics. Though the general image of Pappu Yadav remains that of a Bahubali politician, in Seemanchal, he is seen as a messiah of the oppressed communities, including Muslims. The time he spent away from electoral politics due to his conviction in various cases (he was later acquitted in all), Yadav utilised to create a support base across Seemanchal by helping out anyone in need. He led campaigns against corruption, atrocities by upper castes, exaggerated prices of health services, and so on, and during COVID, he and his JAP volunteers worked round the clock to provide the relief they could to people. While upper castes still fear him, he has earned immense goodwill of the masses in Purnea, Supaul, Madhepura and other areas and the Congress will certainly gain from his induction,” Niraj Kumar, a Patna-based journalist told The Federal.

Though a formal announcement on the seat-sharing formula between the Congress, RJD and CPI-ML for the Lok Sabha polls is yet to be made, Congress sources told The Federal that Yadav is likely to feature in its candidates list from one of the Seemanchal seats. The Congress’s alliance negotiators have already discussed the possibility of Yadav’s candidature with RJD’s Lalu Yadav and Tejashwi Yadav as the party feels his induction would also strengthen the party’s prospects in other constituencies of Seemanchal, including its sitting seat of Kishanganj, to which it has laid claim.

Challenge to defend Lal Singh

If the Congress has reasons to be upbeat about getting Patel, Yadav and Ali into its fold, it should also have reasons to worry about the consequences of its fourth induction – Chaudhary Lal Singh, a former two-term Lok Sabha MP from Jammu’s Udhampur seat, currently represented by Union minister Jitendra Singh. Chaudhary may be a prominent and popular Hindu (Dogra) leader from the Jammu region, but he also comes with a chequered baggage of controversial statements and a penchant for punching above his weight, which often leaves his colleagues slighted.

The biggest challenge for the Congress in defending the return of Lal Singh to its fold, however, is certain to be the public support that the garrulous leader had extended to the men who were accused of raping and murdering an eight-year-old girl in J&K’s Kathua in 2018.

The Kathua incident had shocked the conscience of the country and triggered vociferous calls for death sentence to the accused in the case. However, Lal Singh, then a BJP MLA and minister in the erstwhile state’s PDP–BJP alliance government, had supported the accused, even joining protest rallies against their arrest. Chaudhary had, subsequently quit the BJP and floated his own outfit, the Dogra Swabhimaan Sangathan Party. He had gone on to challenge Jitendra Singh in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from Udhampur but lost his deposit, polling a paltry 19049 votes.

Losing moral high ground

Also, a vocal proponent of redefining the boundaries of Hindu-dominated Jammu and carving it out of J&K as a separate state, Lal Singh had begun to swerve back towards the Congress during Rahul Gandhi’s Kanyakumari to Kashmir Bharat Jodo Yatra. Speculations that Lal Singh would be joining Rahul on the cross-country padyatra when the former Congress president entered Jammu had forced Deepika Pushkar Nath, counsel for the Kathua rape and murder victim’s family who had joined the Congress and emerged as a key face of the party only months earlier, to resign from the Grand Old Party in protest.

On Wednesday, as Chaudhary was inducted into the Congress, Nath put out a series of cryptic tweets, one of which said, “Dear media persons, instead of calling me to take my reaction on his joining, plz call the relevant persons in @INCIndia. I am not available (sic)” while another read, “inki bhi kuch majbooriyan rahi hongi (they too would have had some compulsions)”.

Incidentally, while Lal Singh spoke at length at the Congress’s press conference after his induction, even bragging that “whichever side I join, wins the election”, the party’s media chief Pawan Khera, quickly disbanded the ‘interaction’ without taking any questions from the press as soon as Chaudhary had finished making his comments.

The Kathua incident is one of several other cases of crimes against girls and women over which Khera and his colleagues in the Congress as well as other Opposition leaders of the INDIA bloc have repeatedly slammed the BJP’s inaction and, often, even the involvement of party members in such cases. By inducting Lal Singh in the hope of indeterminate electoral gains on Hindu-dominated Lok Sabha seats of Jammu and Udhampur, the Congress may have just lost that moral high ground.