Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Jan 25: A day after he was named as one of the star campaigners for the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, the former union minister and youth leader RPN Singh on Tuesday resigned from the party and joined the BJP in the presence of the saffron party’s UP in-charge and Union Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. He is likely to contest the UP polls from his stronghold Padrauna, from where he has been elected MLA thrice.
Singh, a Congress Working Committee member and AICC office bearer, is the second big exit from the Congress in Uttar Pradesh after Jitin Prasada quit it last year. Prasada joined the BJP and later became a minister in the Yogi Adityanath government. Like Jitin Prasad and Jyotiraditya Scindia, Singh too was once a close confidant of the former Congress president Rahul Gandhi.
Singh’s exit would also cause much embarrassment to the Congress as only on Monday his name was included by the party in the list of 30 star campaigners for the UP elections. His exit from the party too was shrouded by confidentiality like that of the former mayor of Bareilly who quit the Congress a day after she was named the party candidate for the seat. Singh has also dropped any reference to the Congress in his Twitter bio.
“I have been in one party for the last 32 years, but today I must say that party is no longer what it used to be. Today, everyone knows that if there is one party that is working for the benefit of the people and is working on building the nation, it is the BJP,” RPN Singh told reporters this afternoon. On stage with him was Jyotiraditya Scindia, who took the Congress-to-BJP route in 2020.
“This is a new beginning for me and I look forward to my contribution to nation building under the visionary leadership & guidance of the Honourable Prime Minister Shri @narendramodi, BJP president Shri @JPNadda ji & Honourable Home Minister @AmitShah ji,” Singh said. “Today, at a time, we are celebrating the formation of our great Republic, I begin a new chapter in my political journey. Jai Hind,” tweeted Singh along with his resignation letter to party president Sonia Gandhi.
Thanking Ms. Gandhi for the opportunity to serve the party and the nation, Singh tendered his resignation from the primary membership of the Congress. Singh, once identified as part of Congress’ young leaders who were close to former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi, now joins the league of Jyotiraditya Scindia and Jitin Prasada.
Electorally, his exit from the grand old party will have limited impact given that he is not a pan-Uttar Pradesh leader and his sphere of influence is confined to the Kushi Nagar Lok Sabha constituency, adjoining Gorakhpur, which he represented in 2009. His old Assembly seat of Padrauna, which he represented thrice from 1996 to 2009, falls in the Kushi Nagar constituency.
But Singh’s exit is politically damaging to the Congress as he is considered to be one of the Generation Next leaders of the party. Though he is 57 years old, he was seen as among the leaders who would be part of Rahul Gandhi’s future Congress.
Singh belongs to the OBC Kurmi caste and his elevation as AICC in-charge of Jharkhand some years ago was seen as the party’s signal that it was now giving weightage to OBC-centric politics. Both Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot and his Chhattisgarh counterpart Bhupesh Baghel belong to the OBC community.
Singh figures in the list of young Congress members who have left the party in the last two years including Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sushmita Dev, Jitin Prasada, Priyanka Chaturvedi and Laliteshpati Tripathi. His exit, like that of the others, shows that young leaders see no future for themselves in the party.
It also signals that despite the tall claims of the Congress leaders, the ground-level leaders of the party in Uttar Pradesh sense that the chances of the party’s revival in the politically and electorally crucial state are bleak. Singh, a member of the royal Sainthwar family of Kushinagar, had been with the Congress for close to three decades. He is a three-term MLA. He belongs to a political family. His father Kunwar Chandra Pratap Narain was an MLA and two-time MP and was a minister in the Indira Gandhi government in 1980.
