In the run-up to the parliament polls a year hence, the cup of woes for the Congress is near-full also as the BJP demonstrates a killer instinct to finish it off. Rajasthan, where elections are expected before this year-end, has sent out a fresh danger signal as senior Congressman Sachin Pilot has announced a fast against the Ashok Gehlot government’s long “inaction” against the corruption of the previous BJP government. More than the BJP, this would embarrass the Congress party and the CM, reinforcing the huge gulf that exists between Gehlot and the 45-year-old leader who wants to be the next CM. The gathering of a fresh set of clouds over the Congress establishment started with the current predicament of Rahul Gandhi, who should have been the face of the party in the 2024 parliament polls. A two-year-jail term hanging like a Damocles’ Sword over his head, Rahul can no more breathe easy despite the huge response he won during the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Question now is, who will knit the Congress party’s wayward and aspiring leaders together into one cohesive whole – a prerequisite to effectively take the fight into the enemy territory even on a symbolic note.
The BJP keeps playing more tricks on the Congress with a new frenzy. Consider the ease with which it got Congress veteran AK Antony’s son, Anil, into the BJP – shaming the Congress party to its bones. Clearly, Anil was never a leader anywhere. He lived on the reflected glory of his father and functioned from its sidelines to promote the Congress social media campaigns, mostly against PM Modi and the BJP. Now, he’s in BJP’s pocket, laughing out loud and singing praise of Modi. Or, consider the walkover of former AP chief minister Kiran Reddy to the BJP. He was feeling quite uneasy as he himself had presided over the burial of the Congress party in the Telugu landscape after acting as the last Congress chief minister in AP until 2014. He floated a party to contest that year’s assembly polls there, failed to get even a single seat, vacillated for a while and wormed his way back to the Congress in 2018. Now, his disillusionment is that Rahul Gandhi does not know how to run the party and was not taking ‘advice’ from elders like him. By hoisting a deadwood like Kiran Reddy as the poster boy for the BJP in the Telugu states, the saffronists might perhaps be making a laughing stock out of themselves. Here’s the brutal politics of expediency. Whether the BJP any longer has an ideology to uphold, is a serious question.
