Congress’s interim president Sonia Gandhi said last week she was hurt by a letter written by 23 senior leaders alleging "drift”" in leadership, but no action would be taken against them. However, some of those leaders say the retaliation has already begun.
Congress leader Kapil Sibal said this when he protested the "targeting” of Jitin Prasada. “Unfortunate that Jitin Prasada is being officially targeted in UP. Congress needs to target the BJP with surgical strikes instead wasting its energy by targeting its own” said Sibal on Twitter after the district Congress president in Prasada’s area, Lakhimpur Kheri, passed a resolution calling him a "traitor" in the Congress and sought his expulsion.
Dheeraj Gujjar, the district Congress president, claimed he was instructed by an unnamed AICC general secretary to release the statement. Prasada, former union minister of state, is a signatory to the letter.
Late evening on Wednesday, general secretary (organization), KC Venugopal, issued a letter announcing that a five-member committee was being set up to study and align the Congress’s stand on to several ordinances that the government will seek to clear in the forthcoming parliament session. Members of this committee are P Chidambaram, Digvijay Singh, Jairam Ramesh, Gaurav Gogoi, and Dr Amar Singh, Congress MP from Ludhiana. Missing are the names of the other two top lawyers: Abishek Singhvi and Manish Tewari – who is MP from Anandpur Sahib and another signatory to the letter.
Although the Congress party has said an AICC session will be held in six months where a new president will be elected, this does not reflect in the CWC resolution. Therefore, dissenting leaders are asking what it really means – will the election be held and process completed in six months? Or will it start after six months?
In another interesting development, Shiv Sena mouthpiece Saamna has in an editorial criticised the Congress dissenters: unusual because Shiv Sena has no locus standi in judging the internal affairs of the party. Former Maharashtra chief minister Prithviraj Chavan – who was one of the architects of the Sena-Congress government and braved extensive opposition to the idea especially from Sonia Gandhi – is a signatory to the letter. Clearly now, he is a target.
Former union minister Veerappa Moily, also a signatory, said in a statement after the CWC meeting that "it is an admitted fact that organisation of the Congress party is not in a position to take forward the Congress philosophy and protect the democracy in the present turbulent condition prevailing in the country." He lost the Chickballapur Lok Sabha constituency and was among several senior members of the Congress in Karnataka to have lost the election. But party rival and SC leader Mallikarjun Kharge succeeded in bagging the Rajya Sabha seat when elections to the upper house were held in June.