Veteran Congress leader Digvijaya Singh can’t understand why his party won’t give Priyanka Gandhi Vadra a serious organisational role despite her ‘tremendous, enormous political ability’.
“She certainly deserves greater responsibility. Today she is a general secretary without a defined organisational charge. I don’t understand why. She should be entrusted with a serious responsibility within the AICC,” the former Madhya Pradesh chief minister said last week in an interview to my colleague, Esha Mishra.Millions of Congress workers and leaders have the same question in their minds. They can’t, however, say so publicly, lest it be interpreted as a lack of confidence in Rahul Gandhi. Singh, a Congressman and Gandhi family loyalist for 55 years, doesn’t run such risks. Anyway, the high command sent him an unambiguous message when it chose to field Meenakshi Natarajan, not him, in the Rajya Sabha bypolls. A Rahul confidante, she is known for her ostentatious display of simplicity and poverty.
Singh’s remarks about Priyanka’s underutilisation in the Congress have only highlighted the big puzzle party leaders can’t solve. The Gandhis are known to be a close-knit family, with the siblings displaying a strong bond in public. That makes Priyanka’s amorphous role in the party all the more perplexing. When she formally took the plunge into politics in January 2019, she was appointed All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary in charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh—the region comprising Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency, Varanasi, and chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s home turf, Gorakhpur. She was doomed, if not designed, to fail. Lok Sabha elections were just 10 weeks away. As expected, the Congress fared miserably. As if one failure wasn’t enough, Priyanka was then given charge of the entire state for the 2022 Assembly elections. The result was predictable again.Why would Sonia and Rahul send Priyanka to virtually meet her Waterloo in Uttar Pradesh? From 2006 to 2007, Rahul was running UP Congress. In the run-up to the 2007 Assembly elections, I remember meeting the party’s ticket-seekers who were interviewed by him. They would come out scratching their heads.“How would I know how many families have LPG cylinders in my constituency and how many electricity connections? Politics doesn’t work like this,” they would tell me something along these lines.For all the hype about Rahul’s ‘new politics’, the Congress ended up with 22 seats, three less than the previous election. He led the campaign in 2012 elections, when the party secured 28 seats in the 403-member Assembly. He blamed it on weak fundamentals then, promising to build the organisation. By 2017, he virtually gave up on that and chose to ride piggyback on Akhilesh Yadav.It took Rahul a decade to realise the impossibility of the Congress’ revival in Uttar Pradesh. By 2019, he was not even sure about his own constituency, Amethi, and opted to contest from a second seat in Kerala. So, what prompted him to make Priyanka eastern UP in-charge 10 weeks ahead of the election, and, after the loss, retain her for the subsequent Assembly polls? Was it supposed to be baptism by fire? Or was Rahul convinced that his sister could do in 10 weeks—or three years—what he couldn’t in over a decade? Anyway, electoral losses in Uttar Pradesh did take the sheen off Priyanka a bit, dampening the enthusiasm of those who saw the Congress’ redemption under her leadership.Growing whispers in the Congress
