Gandhinagar : The Congress suffered a setback when disgruntled senior Congress leader in Gujarat Kunvarji Bavalia on Tuesday resigned from the party and the state Assembly, joined the BJP and within minutes was inducted in the Vijay Rupani cabinet as a cabinet minister.
Promptly allocated a ministerial office at the state secretariat, the VIP treatment given to the Congress rebel has created dissent amongst senior BJP leaders who haven waiting for positions within their own set up.
Bavalia, a four-time Congress member of the state Assembly and also a former member of the Lok Sabha, accused the Congress president Rahul Gandhi of pursuing “castiest politics” while praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi for “working for public good.”
In a retaliation, former Congress MLA Bhulabhai Gohil, who had resigned from the party before the Rajya Sabha elections last year and had joined the BJP, quit the ruling party and returned to the Congress.
Several of the dissatisfied BJP MLAs including Madhu Shrivastava, who lately vent spleen against his own party leadership, made sarcastic remarks about the Congress defector being made a minister pronto while sincere workers like him who had been serving the party for years continued to be neglected.
Ever since the appointment of young party MLA Amit Chavda as the state Congress president last month followed by a junior MLA Paresh Dhanani chosen for the post of the leader of the opposition in January, several senior Congress leaders including Bavalia have been up in arms over Rahul Gandhi giving more importance to relatively junior leaders at the cost of the seniors.
Two senior leaders, Jivabhai Patel and Indranil Rajyaguru, have already resigned from the Congress though they have not joined the BJP while others like Bavalia’s colleague Vikram Madam, also an MLA and a former MP, were known to be sitting on the fence.
Only last week, Bavalia called on Gandhi in Delhi and after his return to Ahmedabad he had claimed that the party president had promised to “take into consideration the grievances of the senior leaders.” This morning Bavalia sent his resignation by e-mail to Gandhi , drove straight to the residence of the state Assembly speaker Rajendra Trivedi in Gandhinagar and submitted his resignation as MLA from Jasdan in Rajkot district, went to the BJP headquarter where he was inducted in the ruling party by the state president Jitubhai Vaghani .Later in the evening he was administered the oath of office and secrecy as a minister by the governor O P Kohli at a special ceremony in the Raj-Bhavan.. A senior Koli Patel leader, Bavalia, who is president of the All-India Koli Samaj, was described as an “asset” for the BJP by Vaghani. The state Congress president Chavda, who described Bavalia ”s crossing over to the BJP as a “betrayal of the people,” said the voters in his constituency would teach him a lesson when he would have to face them in a by-election within six months. EOM