RS polls cross-voting: Congress’ dilemma over disciplinary action against MLAs

Already embarrassed by the complicity of its MLAs in the victory of BJP-backed candidates in the March 16 Rajya Sabha polls in Bihar, Haryana and Odisha, the Congress party now faces the tricky task of deciding what disciplinary action to take against the dissenters.

The Congress’s Odisha unit chief Bhakta Charan Das had promptly suspended MLAs Sofia Firdous, Dasarathi Gamango and Ramesh Jena from the party for cross-voting during the Rajya Sabha polls and said that “we will ensure that all three are not just expelled from the party but also from their membership of the Assembly under provisions of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution.”

Cross-voting helps Dilip Ray win

Cross-voting by Firdous, Gamango, Jena and eight MLAs of Naveen Patnaik’s Biju Janata Dal (BJD) helped BJP-backed independent candidate and hotelier Dilip Ray defeat Datteswar Hota, the joint candidate of the BJD and the Congress, in the March 16 polls.

Also read: Mahagathbandhan rift widens after RS poll debacle in Bihar

While Das moved swiftly to suspend the three MLAs, things progressed cautiously in Bihar and Haryana, exposing the Congress’ nervousness in acting decisively against its truant legislators.

Boudh scrapes through in Haryana

In Haryana, Karamvir Boudh, handpicked as party candidate by Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi, barely scraped past the victory line. The 37 MLAs that the Congress has in the Haryana Assembly were well above the required quota of 31 first preference votes needed to win the election. Boudh, however, managed only 28 votes – just one more than the BJP-backed Satish Nandal.

Though Boudh’s victory, after dramatic scenes through the day’s polling and counting, came as a relief, it could not gloss over the humiliation the party suffered yet again in Haryana, where five of its MLAs voted for Nandal. Additionally, the votes cast by four Congress MLAs were declared invalid during counting.

Also read: Odisha Rajya Sabha polls: Congress suspends 3 MLAs for cross-voting

Moments after Boudh’s win, former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and the party’s Haryana in-charge BK Hariprasad asserted that they knew the identity of the Congress MLAs who “betrayed the party” either by cross-voting or by “getting their votes invalidated”. However, it was not until Friday (March 20) evening that the party acted, and even then only selectively.

Show-cause notices served

Unlike the expulsion notices served in Odisha, the five MLAs – Mohammad Ilyas, Renu Bala, Shalley Choudhary, Mohammad Israil and Jarnail Singh – who cross-voted have so far only been served show-cause notices. What has also raised eyebrows is that while the names of these five MLAs were made public, identity of the four MLAs whose votes were declared invalid was “being protected”, with no clarity on whether any action would be taken against them.

In Bihar, where the Congress and its alliance partners suffered a debilitating Assembly poll defeat against the ruling NDA last October, the Rajya Sabha elections brought another setback. Three of the Congress’s six MLAs in the state did not turn up to cast their vote for the Opposition’s joint candidate, RJD leader AD Singh, knowing that even the loss of a single vote would lead to his defeat against the BJP’s Shivesh Ram.

The RJD-led alliance, reduced to just 35 MLAs after last year’s Assembly polls, was six short of the 41-vote mark required to ensure AD Singh’s victory. The RJD had managed to reach that quota by securing support from the lone BSP MLA and five MLAs from Asaduddin Owaisi’s AIMIM, a party Tejashwi Yadav had kept out of the Grand Alliance just six months earlier.

Congress MLAs fail to turn up to vote

On polling day, however, Congress MLAs Manohar Prasad Singh, Surendra Kushwaha and Manoj Bishwas did not turn up to vote for AD Singh and went incommunicado. The abstention of RJD MLA Faisal Rehman compounded the Opposition’s embarrassment. The result was predictable: AD Singh lost to Shivesh Ram, helping the NDA make a clean sweep of the Rajya Sabha polls, which also saw BJP national president Nitin Nabin, JD (U) national president and Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar and Rashtriya Lok Morcha (RLM) chief Upendra Kushwaha win unopposed.

The Congress’s Bihar leadership, like its counterparts in Haryana, has issued show-cause notices to the three MLAs, asking them to explain their absence.

Congress insiders say that while the party’s Odisha unit chief Das is “absolutely clear that Firdous, Gamango and Jena have to be expelled from the party for their betrayal”, his counterparts in Haryana and Bihar, as well as the party’s central in-charges for these states, “do not want to act in haste” against MLAs who cross-voted, abstained or had their votes invalidated.

The reasons for this contrast vary. Sources close to Das say he is keen to use an embarrassing situation to his advantage by “asserting authority” and signalling to the party high command in Delhi that his efforts to revive the Congress in a state where it has been out of power for 25 years will continue undeterred.

Firdous: ‘Party has right to act against me’

Cross-voting by the three MLAs in Odisha came at a time when Das had already been facing criticism from colleagues for acting unilaterally and sidelining senior leaders. His attempt to align with Patnaik’s BJD – a party the Congress has fought for nearly three decades – to outmanoeuvre the BJP in the Rajya Sabha polls had also not gone down well with many within the party.

Firdous, until recently a rising star and potential Muslim face of the party in the state, told The Federal, “The party has the right to act against me in any way it feels necessary, but the leadership must also examine why I was forced to defy the party; they should make an honest attempt to understand our grievances too.”

Interestingly, the Congress had expelled Firdous’ father and former MLA Mohammed Moquim in December for “indulging in anti-party activities”. His expulsion came days after he wrote to Congress Parliamentary Party chief Sonia Gandhi, blaming the party’s decline on “deeper organisational disconnect, wrong decisions, misguided leadership choices and continued concentration of responsibility in the wrong hands”. He had also questioned Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s ability to “resonate with India’s youth” and called for a more “central, visible and active leadership role” for Wayanad MP Priyanka Gandhi.

Those close to Das claim Firdous had been waiting for an opportunity to embarrass the party as vendetta for the action taken against her father. Firdous denies the charge and alleges instead that the Odisha Congress chief had “failed to keep the party united because of his style of functioning”.

By suspending Firdous, Jena and Gamango within hours of the cross-voting episode, Das, said a senior Odisha Congress functionary, had “tried to prevent any other MLA from speaking out of turn”.

RS polls ‘exposed the deep mess’ within Congress

In Bihar and Haryana, however, the situation is markedly different. Senior Bihar Congress MLA Abidur Rehman said the party “should have immediately taken strict action against the three MLAs who did not turn up to vote for AD Singh”, while suggesting that state Congress chief Rajesh Ram perhaps “hesitated because we have only six MLAs now”.

Another Bihar Congress leader was more blunt: “What good will suspending half our MLAs do to the party; it will only hasten their full-fledged defection to the JD-U or BJP and if the BJP manages to get just one more of our MLAs to also defect, then we would cross the anti-defection law threshold and these MLAs would not even have to resign from the Assembly”.

Congress sources said the Rajya Sabha polls had “exposed the deep mess” the party finds itself in and the “complete failure” of Bihar Congress chief Rajesh Ram and state in-charge Krishna Allavaru to “set the house in order” even after last year’s electoral debacle.

Haryana Congress remains split into factions

In Haryana, the situation appears even more complex. A senior party MLA said part of the reason Hooda and Hariprasad took four days to publicly identify the cross-voters was that “they do not belong to one camp.”

The Haryana Congress remains split into factions led by Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Selja, Randeep Surjewala and Birender Singh. Of the five MLAs who cross-voted, two each belong to the Hooda and Selja factions, while one is said to have recently shifted allegiance from Hooda to Birender Singh. That MLAs across factions cross-voted has fuelled further speculation.

Some leaders claim Selja allowed her followers to cross-vote to “embarrass Hooda”, who was tasked with keeping MLAs united behind Boudh. Those in the Selja and Surjewala camps counter that Hooda “deliberately made some of his loyalists cross vote or cast invalid votes” to “keep up pressure” on the party high command by demonstrating his influence.

“This is not the first time such a thing has happened with us in the Rajya Sabha polls in Haryana. In 2022, our leader and candidate Ajay Maken lost the Rajya Sabha election by one vote because one of our senior MLAs (Kiran Chaudhry), who is now a BJP MP, cross-voted due to her differences with Hooda. In 2016, votes of 14 of our MLAs, mostly Hooda loyalists, were invalidated on the charge that they had all used the wrong ink to mark the ballot. This time it was a close shave; our candidate won by one vote even though five of our MLAs cross-voted and four had their votes declared invalid… this is a pattern, not a coincidence and we can’t blame the BJP alone for it. Our leaders are equally responsible. Before we take action against the MLAs who defied the party, the party needs to take action against these factional leaders but we all know that will not happen,” a former Haryana Congress MLA said.