Congress bid to shake off sloth gives Maha Vikas Aghadi headache

Even a worm will turn, wrote the Bard. Something similar appears to be happening in Maharashtra with the Congress shaking up its docile leadership team and appointing the aggressive Nana Patole as the state unit chief. Patole resigned as Assembly Speaker before taking up the party position.

Shuffles within any party ought to be its internal matter, but Congress’s allies in the ruling Maha Vikas Aghadi, the Shiv Sena and the NCP, were wary, perhaps because Patole would not let them continue treating his party as a doormat. For the record though, the allies complained they were not taken into confidence over the Speaker’s resignation, but the Congress rebutted they were informally sounded out at appropriate levels.

Because it is an elected post, the process of mutual consultation to identify a new consensus candidate within the Aghadi needs to be initiated all over again. While both the Sena and the NCP chose to frame the issue as picking a new Speaker, the larger question is the Congress demand for equal say in the Aghadi government. Over a year after the three-party alliance was formed, the grand old party has decided it will no longer needlessly prop up the regional parties.

The logic of playing along just to keep the BJP out of the reckoning without getting proportional power appears to have been thrown out of the window. The new thinking was articulated a few weeks ago when it started demanding the post of deputy chief minister. At present, NCP’s Ajit Pawar is the lone deputy CM and wields a lot of clout. Patole can be expected to try to bully the allies to give his party a powerful seat at the high table.

That he enjoys Rahul Gandhi’s confidence would give him that much more leverage when he enters into tough negotiations within the Aghadi. Managing the affairs of a faction-ridden unit that has multiple former chief ministers is not easy even in the best of times. Patole’s record of party hopping could make him an easy target of detractors. However, one thing is sure, the Congress will not be as staid as it has been in the Aghadi. How Uddhav Thackeray and Sharad Pawar create the space to keep the Congress in good humour remains to be seen.