Cong's second list: Prodding, pushing on as heavyweights shy away from contesting

The Congress may have convinced senior leaders such as Bhupesh Baghel, Tamradhwaj Sahu, and KC Venugopal to contest the upcoming Lok Sabha polls, but the party high command appears to be having a tough time getting Congress warhorses in other states to face the electoral battle.

The party’s second list of 43 candidates declared on Tuesday (March 12) by party general secretary (organisation) KC Venugopal, who reluctantly agreed last week to contest the polls from Kerala’s Alappuzha constituency, featured few Congress heavyweights barring incumbent MPs. This, despite the second list featuring candidates from states, including those of the Hindi heartland, where the Congress is in a direct contest against the BJP and has performed miserably in the last two General Elections.

The Congress has declared 12 candidates for Assam, seven for Gujarat, 10 each for Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, three for Uttarakhand and one for the Union Territory of Daman & Diu. The list features incumbent MPs Pradyut Bordoloi and Gaurav Gogoi from Assam’s Nagaon and Jorhat seats, respectively, and Nakul Nath from Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh.

Lone Muslim candidate

Abdul Khaleque, the sitting Congress MP from Assam’s Barpeta seat, has been denied a ticket and replaced with Deep Bayan. The lone Muslim candidate on Tuesday’s list is senior party leader and incumbent Samaguri MLA Rakibul Hussain, fielded from the Dhubri constituency in Assam. Notably, for Assam, this would be the first Lok Sabha elections after the completion of the delimitation exercise, which significantly altered the social demography and boundaries of erstwhile constituencies.

The Congress has been alleging that the delimitation exercise in Assam was carried out in a manner that “suited the BJP” as the Muslim minority, a key vote bank of the Congress and Badruddin Ajmal’s AIUDF, was now concentrated in a handful of seats unlike earlier when the community had significant pockets across several seats, including Kaliabor, the home turf of Gaurav Gogoi, son of former Assam chief minister late Tarun Gogoi.

With the Kaliabor seat now scrapped to make way for the Kaziranga constituency which has a relatively smaller population of Muslim voters compared to the erstwhile seat, party sources told The Federal, Gogoi was keen on contesting from Nagaon. The party, however, decided to field Gogoi from Jorhat. Sources said the Congress high command was also keen on fielding its Assam unit chief Bhupen Borah from the Sonitpur constituency but his reluctance to contest the election paved the way for the candidature of Prem Lal Ganju.

Shying away from fight

Borah, say party insiders, wasn’t the only leader to shy away from the fight. A number of party satraps, including former chief ministers Kamal Nath, Ashok Gehlot, Digvijaya Singh, Harish Rawat, former Rajasthan deputy CM Sachin Pilot, Rajasthan Congress chief Govind Singh Dotasra and former Union ministers Arun Yadav and Bharatsinh Solanki, have conveyed to the high command that they do not wish to contest the polls.

Solanki, son of former Gujarat chief minister and Congress stalwart, late Madhavsinh Solanki, in fact, made his reservations against contesting the elections known on X. In a post on the micro-blogging site earlier on Tuesday, Solanki said, “My family and I have been given a lot by the Congress party over the decades. Considering my current responsibility as AICC in-charge Jammu & Kashmir and to be able to campaign for the party in Gujarat effectively, I humbly convey to the high command about my wish not to contest this election.”

Solanki, however, added that as a “lifelong soldier” of the Congress party, he would “accept and obey” whatever decision the party’s central leadership takes in regard to his candidature.

Congress sources told The Federal that the party's high command is keen to field Solanki from Gujarat’s Anand constituency, which he won in the 2004 and 2009 Lok Sabha polls. A senior party leader said given the swift and still ongoing exodus of party leaders to the BJP in Gujarat, the high command wanted the few senior leaders who remain within the Congress fold, including Solanki, to contest the elections “to quell the impression that the Congress has not even put up a fight in Gujarat”, the home state of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah, where the saffron party wrested all 26 seats in the last two consecutive general elections.

Failure of High Command?

Solanki’s defiance and the few candidates from Gujarat that the Congress declared on Tuesday, however, suggest that the high command has failed to have its way. “Of the seven candidates we have declared from Gujarat, so far, with the exception of Geniben Thakor from Banaskantha and Anant Patel from Valsad, I doubt anyone will even give a real fight to the BJP,” a party leader from Gujarat said, adding that the Congress had “bet on candidates who either have a base limited to one assembly segment, or worse, can’t even win a municipal election”.

The other candidates that the Congress declared from Gujarat are Rohan Gupta, former social media department chief of the party, from Ahmedabad East, former MLAs Bharat Makwana and Lalit Vasoya from Ahmedabad West and Porbandar, respectively, Siddharth Chaudhary from Bardoli and Nitish Lalan from Kachchh.

With its senior leadership in MP and Rajasthan reluctant to pick the gauntlet, the Congress appears to be banking largely on a mix of second rung leaders, imports from other parties and fresh faces to challenge the BJP.

For instance, the Congress has fielded Dalit leader and incumbent MLA Phool Singh Baraiya, former chief of the Bahujan Samaj Party’s MP unit who had switched to the Congress last year, from the state’s Bhind Lok Sabha constituency, while CWC member Kamleshwar Patel, who lost the December Assembly polls despite being hailed by Kharge as the OBC face of the party, has been fielded from the Sidhi seat. The Congress has fielded Rajendra Malviya from Dewas after Kamal Nath aide Sajjan Singh Verma, who had won the seat in 2009, expressed his reluctance to contest the polls.

Sources said the Congress was still hopeful of fielding its MP unit chief Jitu Patwari from the Indore seat while Digvijaya Singh, who the party had wanted to field from Rajgarh, is pushing for the candidature of his relative and former MLA Priyavrat Singh from this constituency. It is learnt that a senior party leader from MP is negotiating with BJP MP KP Singh Yadav, who had defeated Jyotiraditya Singh, then in the Congress, from Guna in 2019 to join the Congress as he has now been benched by the saffron party, which has fielded his 2019 rival from his sitting seat. If Yadav defects to the Congress, the party hopes to field him from Guna against Scindia.

Kamal Nath's son gets ticket

Meanwhile, Kamal Nath, who made headlines last month following rumours of his possible defection to the BJP, has succeeded in convincing the high command against forcing him into the electoral fray. Nath’s son, Nakul Nath, who had won the Chhindwara seat in 2019 – the only Lok Sabha seat that the Congress bagged from MP that year – has been renominated to contest from the constituency.

The other ‘dynast’ who features in Tuesday’s list is Ashok Gehlot’s son, Vaibhav Gehlot, who had lost the 2019 Lok Sabha polls from the Jodhpur seat, has now been given a ticket from Jalore. Curiously, after the Congress’s humiliating rout in the 2019 polls, Rahul Gandhi, then the party’s president, had criticised both Ashok Gehlot and Kamal Nath, who were then chief ministers of Rajasthan and MP, respectively, for being more concerned about the election of the sons than over the party’s campaign at large.

As was expected, the Congress has fielded Rahul Kaswan, who quit the BJP to join the Congress after being denied a ticket, from Rajasthan’s Churu; a seat that he had won in the 2014 and 2019 polls. Churu is a stronghold of the Kaswan family and had previously been won on four occasions by Rahul’s father, Ram Singh Kaswan. The Congress is hoping that with Kaswan in its fold and relatively popular leaders such as Brijendra Ola (Jhunjhunu), Udaylal Anjana (Chittorgarh), Tarachand Meena, (Udaipur), Govind Ram Meghwal (Bikaner) and Harish Meena (Tonk-Sawai Madhopur) in the fray, the party may be able to stop the BJP from making a second consecutive clean sweep across the state’s 25 constituencies.

Uttarakhand appears to be the lone exception in Tuesday’s list where the central leadership has had limited success in convincing prominent party faces to enter the poll battle. Though former CM Harish Rawat remains opposed to contesting the polls, the Congress has fielded its state unit chief Ganesh Godiyal from Garhwal and former Rajya Sabha MP Pradeep Tamta from Almora.

The next meeting of the party’s election committee is likely to take place on March 15, during which time candidates for crucial states such as Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, and Bihar, where the Congress has formidable allies, may be discussed.

The party remains tight-lipped on whether Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will finally fight the elections from their family seats of Amethi and Rae Bareli, respectively. As reported by The Federal earlier, Congress president Kharge has already indicated to his colleagues that he would focus on campaigning for the party and its allies of the INDIA bloc while leaving his home turn of Gulbarga a different party candidate, preferably one of his relatives.