The party leadership will be forced to choose between Opposition Leader Siddaramaiah and State Congress President D K Shivakumar for the role of Chief Minister if the Congress wins the Karnataka Assembly elections next month.
In such a case, the celebration will be transported back to last year. The decision the grand old party made about the chief ministers of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Chhattisgarh at the time still has an impact today.
The latest attack by senior leader Sachin Pilot against Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and the “I’m on the sidelines” remark made on Sunday by Chhattisgarh Health Minister T S Singh Deo serve as stark reminders to the Congress leadership about the unfinished business in these two states. As Jyotiraditya Scindia defected and the party decided to support Kamal Nath, the party in Madhya Pradesh already felt the effects when it divided and was ousted from office in 2020.
Senior politicians intensified their lobbying for the position of CM after the Congress won the elections in all three states in December 2018. Rahul Gandhi posted a picture of himself with Nath and Scindia at the time, along with the quote from Leo Tolstoy, “The two most potent soldiers are patience and time.”
That was Scindia’s plain message. Because even though he is the future, he must exercise patience. Scindia, however, did not, and the delicate balance collapsed. In March 2020, he left the Congress, toppling the Kamal Nath administration and leaving the party humiliated.
Rahul, though, shared further images on Twitter that winter. In the second image, he was accompanied by Gehlot and Pilot, and the caption read: “The united colors of Rajasthan.” Such unity has now proven to be elusive. For Rajasthan Congress, the previous four years have been turbulent. The party has not experienced peace in the desert state since Pilot’s uprising in the summer of 2020, the leadership’s unsuccessful attempt to replace Gehlot last September, and the most recent dispute when Pilot accused Gehlot of sitting on “corruption” cases against the previous Vasundhara Raje-led government.
In contrast to Scindia, who was just given optimism about the future, sources close to Pilot claim that Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra assured him that he would be appointed chief minister in the final year of the government’s mandate. Such accord may have encouraged Pilot to end his uprising. He was also compelled to smoke the peace pipe because he was unable to win the support of other MLAs.
His most recent barrage of insults directed at Gehlot has the Congress high command in a pickle, especially as it coincides with a contentious standoff between the leadership and the BJP-led Central government over matters like Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification and the Adani affair.