Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Aug 24: With the woos for the Congress continuing, the party’s national spokesperson and youth leader Jaiveer Shergill on Wednesday resigned from the party post with a sharp attack on the Gandhis and the current party leadership for a blunt decision-making process.
Coming close on the heels of the two other senior leaders, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma quitting the party’s panels for Jammu and Kashmir and Himachal Pradesh respectively, Shergill’s attack on the party leadership exposes the distance the Gandhis at the top had created with the grass-root workers in the party.
In sharp jabs at the Gandhis, Shergill in his resignation letter said the “vision of the party’s decision-makers is no longer in sync” with the aspirations of the youth. He claimed that all the three Gandhis, Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka, had refused him time for any meeting for over a year, he told reporters after quitting.
“The decision-making of the Congress party is not in sync with the ground reality anymore. I’ve been seeking time from Rahul Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi & Priyanka Gandhi Vadra for more than a year, but we are not welcomed in the office,” Jaiveer Shergill said.
“In the past eight years, I have not taken anything from the Congress, only poured into the party. Today when I’m being pushed to bow down before people because they’re close to the top leadership – this isn’t acceptable to me,” he said. He also accused the leadership of being “influenced by sycophants,” a charge levelled against the leadership by many other grass-root level workers of the party in the past.
The primary reason for his move, he said, was that the ideology and the vision of the current decision-makers of the Congress is no longer in sync with the aspirations of the youth and modern India. “Furthermore, it pains me to say that decision-making is no longer for the interest of the public and the country. Rather, it is influenced by the self-serving interests of individuals indulging in sycophancy and consistently ignoring on ground reality. This is something I cannot morally accept or continue to work with,” Shergill wrote.
The 39-year-old lawyer from Punjab was among the youngest and most prominent spokespersons of the Congress. He had not been seen at the party’s media briefings for a while. The party sources said the top leadership withheld him permission to address the media for the last few months.
His resignation is the third this month after two veterans, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma, quit party posts in their home states. Both leaders are part of the “G-23” or group of 23 rebels who wrote to Sonia Gandhi in 2020 calling for an overhaul of the organization along with “full-time and visible leadership.”
The Congress has lost several leaders while struggling with election defeats and an organisational drift over the past few years. An exodus started in 2020 with the exit of Jyotiraditya Scindia, who is now a Union Minister, and UP minister Jitin Prasada. This year, former Union Ministers Kapil Sibal, Ashwani Kumar and RPN Singh quit the party.
The Congress is getting sharply divided between the Gandhi loyalists and the group of G-23 dissidents and their supporters over the leadership choice particularly after Rahul Gandhi refused to take back the mantle of the party, Sonia none too keen to continue on health ground and Priyanka Vadra lacking the confidence to accept the responsibility.
The party leadership is learnt to be favouring the senior leader and Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot, one of the ardent supporters of the Gandhis, to succeed Sonia Gandhi as the party president. Reports in a section of the media claimed that Sonia Gandhi, before flying abroad for a medical check-up, spoke with Gehlot on Tuesday in a closed-door meeting and asked him to take over as the party president.
Gehlot, who claimed that he had only paid a courtesy call to Mrs Gandhi on Tuesday, denied that he was given any such offer and said he was only focussing on his current responsibilities given by the party, the chief minister of Rajasthan and election in-charge of Gujarat for the coming state Assembly elections. He had also claimed that Rahul Gandhi should take back the mantle of the party and if he continued the denial mode, “it will be a huge disappointment for thousands of Congressmen.”
But in case the 71-year-old Gehlot filed his nomination for the Congress presidentship with the obvious backing of the Gandhis, the possibility of a contest for the top post cannot be ruled out, sources said. The G-23 could field a candidate to challenge him and in the process also challenge the Gandhis.
The Congress has to elect a new chief by September 20. The party is already running a few days late to start its internal election. The schedule may be announced later this week after a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), which will be attended virtually by Sonia Gandhi.
