Cong’s RS list only rewards loyalists, lacks social engineering, vision

With its shrinking footprint in state assemblies preventing the Congress from generously doling out Rajya Sabha nominations, the party, on Wednesday (February 14), failed to offer any cogent direction to its socio-political narrative with its list of candidates for the ensuing polls to the Upper House of Parliament.

The imminent Rajya Sabha debut of former party president Sonia Gandhi as a member from Rajasthan is expected to dominate the news cycle over the Congress’s candidate list. However, the leaders that the Congress high command has picked for the remaining nine seats that the party hopes to win in the current round of biennial polls offer no glide path for an alternative vision of the struggling Grand Old Party’s engagement with issues inside Parliament or with the larger electorate outside it.

'Tired', ‘defeated’ faces

Tired old faces such as Renuka Chowdhury and Ajay Maken, who have lost successive elections to the Lok Sabha and offer no heft to the party’s parliamentary interventions nor serve any purpose of social engineering in direct elections, have been awarded with Rajya Sabha tickets in the current round from Telangana and Karnataka. The party’s other Rajya Sabha candidate from Telangana is its former state Youth Congress chief M Anil Kumar Yadav, a leader so little known in the party’s ecosystem that for hours after the announcement of his candidature, many Congress leaders were busy congratulating Uttar Pradesh Congress leader and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s aide Anil Kumar Yadav on being given a ticket.

Interestingly, the party had also fielded Maken, a former MP from Delhi, as candidate from Haryana in the June 2022 Rajya Sabha elections but he had lost due to alleged sabotage by his party colleagues, which paved the way for media baron Kartikeya Sharma’s entry into the Upper House as a BJP-backed independent candidate. Maken, who is known to enjoy the confidence of all three members of the Gandhi family – Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka – was subsequently appointed Treasurer of the AICC.

More efforts to reward loyalists than revive party

Similar is the case with the tickets that the party has awarded to Akhilesh Prasad Singh from Bihar, GC Chandrasekhar from Karnataka and Ashok Singh from Madhya Pradesh. Ashok Singh, like Chowdhury and Maken, has been losing election after election from his home district of Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh and, though as the treasurer of the party’s state unit he enjoys cordial relations with most party colleagues in the state, he neither hails from a caste group that the Congress has been trying to woo towards its fold nor has the reputation of a deft politician.

Ashok’s nomination to the Upper House, Congress sources told The Federal, is in part due to his proximity to former chief minister Digvijaya Singh and in part for his reputation as a staunch rival of Congress-turned-BJP leader and titular Gwalior royal Jyotiraditya Scindia.

The party has also handed another Rajya Sabha term to Syed Naseer Hussain, the only member of a religious minority in the list, but his re-nomination, party insiders concede, has little to do with his prowess as a parliamentarian or his standing as a Muslim leader. Instead, Hussain has been picked from the “quota” of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, who also hails from Karnataka and who had picked Hussain as one of the key members of his secretariat after being soon elected party president in October 2022.

Return of Abhishek Manu Singhvi

The re-nomination of Congress’s foremost legal eagle, Supreme Court senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, who will now enter the Rajya Sabha from Congress-ruled Himachal Pradesh, is reward for his constant legal counsel to his party and its leaders in crucial matters. Singhvi has also been a combative spokesperson for the party on any issue connected with the law and the courts. His return to the Rajya Sabha after his current term as MP from Trinamool Congress-ruled West Bengal ended was a foregone conclusion, party leaders said.

The only matter for the Congress to resolve was to decide which state it wished to nominate Singhvi from given that the party’s zero presence in the Bengal assembly and its soured relations with Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had ruled out the possibility of his re-election from Bengal.

Undoing past wrongs

In giving a ticket to Dalit leader Chandrakant Handore from Maharashtra, the Congress leadership has tried to undo a wrong done to the senior leader by a section of his party colleagues in the June 2022 Maharashtra Legislative Council polls.

The party had fielded Handore and Bhai Jagtap as candidates in the MLC polls in 2022 with clear instructions that first preference votes had to be polled in Handore’s favour while Jagtap was to secure his win with the additional votes from allies, Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). When the results were announced, it turned out that Jagtap had polled a higher number of first preference votes from the Congress while Handore lost because of alleged cross-voting by his party leaders. That election result was a precursor to the fall of the Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress Maha Vikas Aghadi government. Handore had made no secret of his sense of hurt at being “betrayed by colleagues” and over the party’s central leadership “not doing enough” to ensure that its Maharashtra leaders followed the writ of the high command.

Incidentally, Handore’s ensuing re-election comes at a time when the Congress in Maharashtra is witnessing a fresh churn with the recent defection of former chief minister Ashok Chavan to the BJP. Although Chavan has also resigned as the MLA from Bhokar, he is learnt to enjoy support of about a dozen Congress MLAs in the Maharashtra assembly. These MLAs have, so far, indicated to the party high command that they have no plans of following Chavan into the BJP but the Congress leadership will need to keep a close eye on its flock to prevent another setback for Handore, which, if it happens, is certain to play out poorly for the party among the sizeable Dalit electorate of the state.

Lessons to learn from BJP

There is no denying that the Congress’s principal rival, the BJP also uses Rajya Sabha nominations to elect to Parliament otherwise “unelectable” leaders such as Nirmala Sitharaman, Hardeep Puri, JP Nadda or Ashwini Vaishnaw, or even to poach leaders from other parties.

Yet, it is also a fact that under Narendra Modi, the BJP has turned the process of picking its Rajya Sabha candidates into a skilful exercise in social engineering and reimagining its political narrative by accommodating leaders spread across castes and communities that were otherwise elusive voting blocs of the party.

This, when today’s BJP, like the Congress in what now seems like a distant past, enjoys brute majorities in a large number of state assemblies and can, thus, afford to squander Rajya Sabha nominations to appease disgruntled leaders or reward sycophants. That’s something the Congress refuses to learn, even now.