Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, May 18: Another young leader has left the Congress sinking ship. After days of sulking, Gujarat state Congress working president and young leader, who jumped to prominence by leading the “Patidar” agitation that fructify in 10 per cent reservation for the economically backward classes, quit the Congress on Wednesday launching a frontal attack on Rahul Gandhi who had welcomed him into the party with open arms in 2019.
His resignation letter sent to the party national president Sonia Gandhi was full of vitriolic against Rahul Gandhi who had “failed to meet him separately” to discuss Gujarat issues when the former national president had visited the state recently to initiate the party’s campaign for the elections to the state Assembly scheduled by the end of the year.
Even as the party is said to be considering to hold state-level Udaipur conclave type “shivirs” to focus state issues to take on the respective ruling parties, cracks have developed between the ruling DMK and its close ally Congress in Tamil Nadu over the release by the Supreme Court of a convict in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case who has already spent more than 30 years in jail. While most of the political parties in Tamil Nadu welcomed the apex court’s order and the chief minister MK Stalin even went to the Chennai airport to meet the released convict, the Tamil Nadu Congress differed with other parties and strongly denounced hobnobbing of the political leaders with the convict.
In his resignation letter, Hardik, who lately had been in close touch with some BJP leaders despite strongly denying any “Congress to BJP” switch which many other Congress leaders and elected representative had been doing in the last two years, wrote that the party top leaders “were distracted by their mobile phones” and that the Gujarat Congress was more interested in ensuring “chicken sandwiches” for them when the senior leaders visited the state directly snubbing Rahul Gandhi.
His criticism of the Congress leadership was immediately denounced by the state Congress which said Hardik’s use of the language smacked of “BJP dictation” and had apparently been pressured to quit the Congress and expectedly join the BJP, the party he had been strongly criticising since the launch of the “Patidar reservation agitation.” The All India Congress Committee general secretary Shaktisinh Gohil, a member of the Rajya Sabha from Gujarat, referred to the various central agencies like the CBI, the enforcement directorate and income tax departments to terrorise Congress leaders into leaving the party and join the BJP and said some similar such tactics must had been used against Hardik to force him to quit the Congress. Incidentally, a case under the sedition law is pending against Hardik while he is on bail in several other cases registered against him during the “Patidar reservation agitation.”
The high-profile Patidar leader has been in touch with the BJP leadership over the past two months and is likely to join the ruling party within a week, sources said. “When I met top leaders, they seemed distracted by their mobile phones and other issues as opposed to listening to issues concerning Gujarat,” wrote Hardik Patel. “Senior leaders in Gujarat are more interested in ensuring that visiting leaders get their chicken sandwiches than engaging with people during yatras,” he commented.
In another attack on Rahul, Patel wrote, “Our leader was abroad when he was needed in India during critical times,” a language frequently used by the BJP to attack Rahul Gandhi. In another echo of BJP criticism, Patel said, the “Congress leadership strongly dislikes Gujarat and has no interest in the state”, he said, adding that the party “has been rejected in virtually every state because they have no roadmap to present to the people.” The party, Hardik Patel said, “came in the way” of resolving key issues like the Citizenship Amendment Act, the Goods and Services Tax, the Ayodhya temple-mosque case and Article 370 (the scrapped constitutional provision that gave special status to Jammu and Kashmir),” apparently toeing the BJP line.
During the Patidar agitation for quota, Hardik Patel had likened Union Home Minister Amit Shah to “General Dyer (the British officer responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919).” He had also blamed the BJP for a sex CD controversy in 2017, just before the Gujarat election. “His tweets and his quotes were always against BJP. Our leaders who have gone to the BJP have told us that they were given a script to write. Hardik’s words are BJP’s words and there is no truth in them,” Gohil alleged.
The Patidar activist joined the Congress just before the 2019 Lok Sabha election. He was made the Working President of the Congress in Gujarat, a post he said had meant little during his years in the party as he was never part of decision-making. He had been complaining over the past few weeks about the Gujarat Congress leadership sidelining him. When Rahul Gandhi visited Gujarat earlier this month, a widely anticipated meeting between the two did not take place.