Who To Name Congress PM Candidate: Congress’ Dilemma

After the crushing defeat in the just concluded state assembly elections, the Congress leadership is faced with its biggest dilemma; who to be named as its Prime Ministerial candidate for the next general elections to the Lok Sabha.

Last Sunday when results came out, Sonia Gandhi declared that soon her Party would declare the name of its Prime Ministerial candidate. After days of discussions and meetings, the Congress is yet to come to a decision to name a leader. There has been and there is chorus of demand to name Rahul Gandhi as the Prime Ministerial candidate of the Congress Party. Top leaders of the Congress include Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, A K Antony and Digvijay Singh have endorsed this line but both Sonia and Rahul are hesitant to officially declare the name.

I am told, during the past few days, majority of the Congress leaders are not in favour of declaring anybody as the Party’s Prime Ministerial candidate. But there was chorus of disapproval of Manmohan Singh as the face of the Congress in the government. Some Congress leaders even suggested that Manmohan Singh should resign and pave the way for a new Prime Minister before the elections. Here too there is none in the Congress today who can be projected as its Prime Ministerial candidate.

First name that comes in mind is that of A K Antony, a man with clean record and clean image. But his problem is he can’t speak Hindi and hence can’t connect to the people. P Chidambaran is the second name but he too suffers from lack of knowledge of Hindi. There is none other in the Congress to lead the Party in next elections as the face of Prime Minister to match Narendra Modi of the BJP.

There are reports that some Congress leaders have suggested the name of Ghulam Nabi Azad. He is sober and is not a hard core Muslim. Besides, he comes from the troubled state of Jammu and Kashmir.

At this time when the Muslim voters have started deserting the Congress as it was evident in Delhi, Rajsthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhatisgarh where large number of Muslims voted for the BJP, Ghulam would be able to galvanise the minority vote across the country. But there is no consensus in the Congress camp on his name. This leaves a vacuum in the Congress camp with Manmohan Singh being completely ruled out for third term in office.

There is no indication that the Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi who put up a brave face in the hour of defeat has the support to bring drastic changes in the organization. He said, “I will be aggressive in transforming the Party”. No chance, the corrupt and influential leaders of the Congress are so well entrenched in the system that it is difficult for Rahul or Sonia to weed them out. Mani Shanker Aiyer, a Rajiv loyalist has advised Sonia and Rahul Gandhi to go through the speech of Rajiv Gandhi that he had delivered at the Congress centenary session of the AICC in Bombay in 1985. He had said then that it was high time the Congress throws agents and power brokers out of the Congress, if the Party has to survive. But it is almost more than 28 years since then that the Congress leadership far from ejecting power brokers from the Party has espoused corrupt and brokers both in the Party organization and in the government.

~R. K. Sinha