Rainbow leadership aims to fill void left by Dikshit

Mukesh Ranjan in New Delhi

After more than two decades, the Congress will contest elections in Delhi without Sheila Dikshit, the three-time former Chief Minister of the city-state. She had emerged on Delhi’s political scene in 1998, helping the Congress defeat BJP’s bid to counter Punjabi politics. Under Dikshit, Delhi also saw a major facelift in infrastructure.

However, during the course of 15 years of rule, her domination also proved counter-productive for the Congress, as the party was left with no other leader at par.

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The all-pervasive negativism against mainstream politics incidentally set in with the national capital as the backdrop. It swept away the Congress first in Delhi in 2013 and then from the national scene in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The advent of AAP very swiftly spread over the traditional catchment areas of Congress in the city. Even after almost seven years of a defining shift in Delhi politics, the Congress still appears to be struggling to regain its lost identity and control over voters.

To win back lost ground, the Congress leadership appears to have been trying to stitch an umbrella leadership. The way leaders have been chosen to deal with party affairs shows that the Congress has been giving prominence to a coalition of social segments, be it Punjabi, Purvanchali, Sikh, Baniya or Muslim.

However, in between, former Congress president Rahul Gandhi had experimented by giving the reins to Ajay Maken, who has always been seen as Dikshit’s rival in the state unit. That experiment consequently unsettled the Dikshit team and the impact was seen in her two trusted lieutenants, Arvinder Singh Lovely and Raj Kumar Chauhan, leaving the party and joining the BJP. Lovely, however, has since come back into the party fold. Another team member AK Walia, credited with having given Delhi a number of flyovers and hospitals, had also become politically inactive.

New beginning

Sensing the ill-effects of the experiment, the current Congress leadership appears to have decided to go in for a rainbow leadership. It has appointed Subhash Chopra, an old hand and contemporary of Sheila Dikshit, as the state unit chief. Four-term MLA Chopra, having a base in south Delhi, also has good control over corporators.

In a bid to win back trust of the Purvanchali vote base, the party has chosen former Indian cricketer Kirti Azad to head the party’s campaign committee for 2020. He had quit the BJP on the eve of this year’s Lok Sabha elections and unsuccessfully contested the polls from Dhanbad constituency in Jharkhand on a Congress ticket. Since then, he has been brought to Delhi and given the new responsibility. But party watchers believe that Azad may be unable to do much about the inroads made by the AAP and BJP among Purvanchali voters, as he has always been seen active only in Delhi’s cricket association.

The Congress committee has another Purvanchali face in Mahabal Mishra, who had won the Lok Sabha election in 2009 from West Delhi and is considered to have better acceptability among migrant voters from Bihar and eastern UP. He, however, has a geographical limitation of being a leader having appeal only in the western party of the city, though a sizeable number of Purvanchali voters live in east and north-east parts of Delhi.

Similarly, old hand Jaiprakash Aggarwal, having good control over old Delhi’s trading community, and Arvinder Singh Lovely, a strong Sikh face, are already on board to lead the party campaign in the run-up to the Assembly elections.

The Congress continues to struggle to find an effective Jat leader, particularly since Sajjan Kumar was sentenced to jail for his involvement in the anti-Sikh riots of 1984.

On the face of it, the Congress, particularly after the demise of Sheila Dikshit, appears to have been relegated to the third position in Delhi’s politics. However, since the BJP has been faltering on the leadership issue and failing to take up local issues and AAP is facing an anti-incumbency of five years’ rule in Delhi, there is still hope for the Grand Old Party in 2020.