Rakesh Dixit
On January 15, Arun Yadav got the MPCC chief post as his 40th birthday gift. Unmindful of the utter failure of his protégé as AICC secretary and union minister of state, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi reposed faith in the eldest son of former MP deputy chief minister late Subhash Yadav a third time. That Rahul with all his talks of empowering the dispossessed in the Congress is still enamoured of dynastic politics was evident in Arun’s surprising elevation. Arun had started his political career barely seven years ago. At 33, he became Lok Sabha member in the bye-poll from his father’s Khargone constituency following disqualification of the sitting BJP MP Krishna Murari Moghe in 2007.
Moghe had been disqualified for holding office of profit when he contested 2004 Lok Sabha election. Yadav won again for the Lok Sabha in 2009, this time from adjoining Khandwa seat and was inducted in the Dr Man Mohan Singh cabinet as union minister for heavy industries. Later he was shifted in the same capacity to the agriculture ministry. When his performance didn’t improve , Arun was divested of the post and made AICC secretary. He unsuccessfully sought re-election from Khandwa seat in 2014 Lok Sabha election.
His successive failures didn’t dissuade Rahul Gandhi to nominate Arun Yadav as head of the poll-battered Congress in Madhya Pradesh. Hardly anyone in the sate Congress seemed enthused by Yadav’s elevation, given his record of failures and brief career in politics. Demoralised Congressmen and women were expecting a dynamic leader to steer the party out of the morass it had sucked into. They feared the new man at the helm of the state Congress will lead to greater disaster. In the last one year since Arun took over, the worst fears of the party men have come true with shocking rapidity. Under Yadav’s disastrous leadership, an existential crisis is staring at the moribund MP Congress.
Barely four months after he took over, a clueless Arun committed a series of blunders when he was supposed to resuscitate the fragmented party in the run up to the Lok Sabha election. He would seldom look beyond his coterie of loyalists for suggestions even as the clamour for Lok Sabha ticket kept growing.
The Congress seemed reduced to a pathetic spectacle while a cocky BJP surged ahead in candidate selection as well as campaigning. Of course, the Modi wave was favouring the BJP, but there was no dearth of issues for the Congress to corner the Shivraj Singh government. The multi-layered admission and recruitment scam (VYAPAM) had begun to unfold. Every day, new facts were surfacing about the complicity of the BJP leaders in the scam. The Shivraj government was on the defensive. The Congressmen and women sensed a great opportunity in the unfolding scam to gain electoral advantage at the expense of the mortified Shivraj government.
But Arun let them down. His pusillanimity caused revulsion in the cadres on one hand and disillusionment among state leaders , on the other. As a result, the Congress was completely routed. The two seats—Guna and Chhindwara- that the Congress managed to retain in the election were justifiably credited to individual influence of Jyotiraditya Scindia and Kamal Nath respectively. The worst ever showing of the Congress led to further isolation of the PCC chief. Since then, the state Congress headquarters in Bhopal has seldom, if ever, seen the kind of hustle and bustle that used to characterise it.
Arun Yadav, however, chose not to learn any lesson from the debacle. He is still surrounded by the coterie of inexperienced cohorts. Big leaders such as Digvijay Singh, jyotiraditya Scindia, Kamal Nath and Suresh Pachori have stopped cooperating with the PCC chief. State’s media hardly takes note of the goings-on in the Congress.
Whatever little agitational politics has been seen on the state’s streets has been the outcome of initiative of individual Congress leaders who no longer look to the PCC chief for direction.
Given the party’s sorry state of affairs, its crushing defeat in the civic body election was inevitable. The BJP has won in all the corporations for which elections were held in November 2014. Where the Congress managed to win in municipalities, the candidates succeeded despite of and not because of the state leadership.
One shocking example would suffice to indicate the cluelessness of Arun Yadav vis-a-vis the local body elections. He acquiesced in the request of his crony and state general secretary Vimlendru Tiwari to field the wife of Tiwari’s brother in mayoral election for Rewa. She lost her deposit in the election. Kavita Pandey, a powerful claimant of Congress , who revolted after being denied ticket, fought the election as independent . Kavita secured more votes than the Congress candidate. Had she been fielded by the Congress, the party could have atleast won the Rewa mayoral election.
Last week, Arun yadav admitted the mistake of heeding Vimlendu Tiwari’s request. The admission followed Arun’s reprimand by Rahul Gandhi in New Delhi. The party high command has asked Arun to clean up the mess in the party at the earliest. Arun’s response to the chastening is laughable. Instead of chalking out a strategy to ensure that disillusioned party men come on board to fight the BJP unitedly, he chose to get rid of his careless personal assistant and driver !
Tags
No comments:
Post a Comment