Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, June 25: Despite the intervention by the West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and other leaders to bring peace between the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party at the Patna conclave, the gulf between the two parties seems to be increasing before the second round of the opposition meeting in Shimla next month.
The leaders of the two parties kept attacking each other on Sunday accusing the other of being in league with the BJP even after the AAP threatened to boycott the Shimla gathering if the Congress did not publicly denounce the Delhi ordinance on civil services and promise to support the AAP move to defeat the ordinance-replacing bill in the Rajya Sabha. The Congress has been unwilling to spell out its stand before the Parliament session is convened, though party chief Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi have said there was no question of supporting “anything moved by the BJP”.
But the AAP is obsessed with its own problem and wants the Congress to announce its stand immediately. The opposition efforts to present a united front to the BJP in the 2024 elections took another hit today as Congress’s Ajay Maken launched a sharp attack on the AAP and accused it of being in league with the BJP. The AAP-Congress face-off had dominated the opposition’s first formal meeting in Patna on Friday.
“On the one hand, Arvind Kejriwal is seeking support of the Congress. Then he goes to Rajasthan and gives statements against one of our senior-most leaders, a three-time Chief Minister, Ashok Gehlot, and Sachin Pilot, one of the very senior leaders and a former minister,” Maken said in a video statement today.
“So do they (AAP) really want the support of the Congress or make peace with us?” Maken said. “What AAP’s chief spokesman said today — that is nothing new. They gave statements against the Congress even on the day of the all-party meet,” he added, accusing Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal of being in league with the BJP.
“The point is he (Mr Kejriwal) does not want to go to jail — for which all preparations have been made since he had indulged in corruption,” added the Delhi Congress leader, who have been hawkish on AAP for years. Kejriwal had taken on the Rajasthan Chief Minister last week at a campaign rally in the state, where elections are due by the year-end.
“When we were coming here, we saw Gehlot Saheb has put up his posters all over Ganganagar and around this stadium. I want to tell him that if he had worked for the last five years, he would not have to do this,” Kejriwal had said at a rally last Sunday.
“Both the parties (Congress and BJP) are involved in corruption. During Vasundhara Raje’s government, Ashok Gehlot used to accuse them of corruption… when Ashok Gehlot’s government came to power, Sachin Pilot kept asking him to arrest Vasundhara Raje but Ashok Gehlot said, ‘I will not arrest her, she is like my sister’,” Kejriwal had added.
Bringing AAP and the Congress on board for a united opposition is one of the most challenging tasks undertaken by Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar. The two parties have been at loggerheads since AAP swept the Congress out of power nearly a decade ago and has been growing at its cost since. After the party’s sweeping victory in Punjab last year, Kejriwal is focussing on Congress-ruled Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
The AAP in turn dubbed the Congress an egoist party and appealed to Rahul Gandhi “to show a big heart.” Referring to former Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s ‘mohabbat ki dukaan‘, senior AAP leader and Delhi’s Health Minister Saurabh Bharadwaj said he likes the ‘dialogue’ which Gandhi often repeats, “main nafrat ke bazaar me mohabbat ki dukaan khol kar baitha hoon (I have opened a shop of love in the market of hatred)”.
“Sir, we believe there is a nafrat ka bazaar (market of hatred), but you should also give love there. If Opposition parties have come to you asking for love, and you say you don’t have it, then it raises questions on your mohabbat ki dukaan,” he said.
Bharadwaj also had cautionary advice for the grand old party on public perception. He said being egoistic was fine, but there was a threshold beyond which people and other parties would start feeling that the new government after regime change would be high on ego.
In an apparent reply to Maken’s accusation against Kejriwal for criticising Rajasthan Congress leaders, Bhardwaj appealed to Opposition parties to move over past comments against each other, as they have been rivals in states, but now need to come together. “A lot of parties contest elections against each other in different states. Samajwadi Party and Congress contest against each other in Uttar Pradesh. Trinamool Congress, Congress, and the Left fight each other in West Bengal. Left and Congress are rivals in Kerala. In spite of all these contradictions, we have to come together now,” he said, adding that such contradictions will cause bitterness as parties have been contesting against each other for long, and may do it again in states.
“However, if you go into what party spokespeople said against each other, then the list is long, from both sides. One has to leave that behind and move ahead,” Mr Bharadwaj said. It’s a painful job — to leave seats for others, even your competitors — the AAP leader said, adding that it requires a big heart.
Rahul Gandhi in the Patna conclave had said his party had an open mind about the alliance and was ready to forget the past. “We are here with an open mind…. without any past likes and dislikes. All of us will be flexible. We will need to be together in this fight, whatever it takes,” he had said.
Distancing itself from opposition unity move, the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) working president KT Rama Rao on Sunday said their fight against the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections should be based on “principal issues” before the country, but unfortunately they seem to be “obsessed” with “dislodging someone” from power.
Mr Rao, who is a state minister and son of Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao, also said his party would never compromise on the issue of core welfare principles for the country, asserting it would form an alliance only with those political parties with which it sees a common agenda for the benefit of the people, a hint for going close to the BJP.
“The fight (against the BJP) should be on principal issues before the country. Unfortunately, we are losing the plot there. We seem to be obsessed and worried about dislodging someone or putting somebody there, and that should not be the agenda. The agenda should be how the basic priorities of the country have to be met,” he said clearly indicating that the BRS would not support any move to “dislodge” Modi.
“You should not be uniting against somebody. You should be uniting for something. What is that something, nobody is able to figure out,” he said when asked to comment on the meeting of 16 opposition parties held in Patna on Friday in a bid to forge unity to take on the BJP in the 2024 General Elections. The BRS skipped the meeting that was hosted by JD(U) supremo and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to work on an opposition alliance.