“Badle badle mere sarkar nazar aate hai” (Chaudhvin Ka Chand)
The body language and style of functioning of Rahul Gandhi have undergone a sea change since the results of the Lok Sabha polls on June 4, 2024. The Leader of the Opposition has become far more assertive and a de facto political face of the Congress party.
Just the other day, AICC General Secretary KC Venugopal got a taste of Rahul’s transformation when he received a file containing the names of 35 potential party functionaries. Venugopal was surprised because he had been sitting on an ‘all-clear’ folder that supposedly contained the names of all would-be AICC functionaries approved by AICC President Mallikarjun Kharge, as well as Sonia and Rahul Gandhi.
For Venugopal, the list of additional names bounced around in his head, first in disbelief, then in shock, and finally, in anger. As General Secretary (O), he should have been in the loop. The anger gave vent to an incoherent sentence that is still being deciphered. The buzz is that Venugopal may either return to his home state of Kerala as state party chief or consolidate his parliamentary role as the head of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), a top parliamentary body.
In the Congress circles, Ahmed Patel is credited with bringing KC Venugopal closer to Rahul Gandhi. Legend has it that when Venugopal became a Member of Parliament, Patel, then political secretary to UPA Chairperson and Congress President Sonia Gandhi, got him seated next to Rahul in the Lok Sabha on the premise that a non-descript MP from Kerala would have little influence on the Gandhi scion. The reverse happened. By 2019, Patel used to describe Venugopal as “his mistake.”
Coming back to the goings-on in the present-day Congress, a closer scrutiny revealed that Rahul had met 35 leaders tipped to become AICC secretaries without Venugopal’s knowledge. Apparently, a trio consisting of Sachin Rao, Meenakshi Natarajan, and Sasikanth Senthil had arranged a meeting between Rahul and the ‘best and brightest’ new faces. Senthil, a former IAS officer turned Congress Lok Sabha MP from Tamil Nadu, is an expert in election management. Rao is a communication expert and a member of the Congress Working Committee, while Natarajan, a former Lok Sabha MP from Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh, has worked with Rahul when he was AICC General Secretary back in 2007.
At another level, the signalling of Venugopal’s declining political stature indicates Rahul’s growing self-confidence. Since 2007, Rahul has been known to take a shine to senior party leaders – first Digvijaya Singh, then Madhusudan Mistry, followed by CP Joshi, Mohan Prakash, and KC Venugopal.
In the last 48 hours, Congress circles have been abuzz with rumours and speculations that the trio of Sachin Rao, Meenakshi Natarajan, and Sasikanth Senthil is emerging as Rahul’s eyes and ears. The former AICC chief is reportedly giving importance to some other faces such as Manickam Tagore and Praniti Shinde, in addition to seasoned figures like Gaurav Gogoi and Ajay Maken.
A big and startling reshuffle in the AICC secretariat is on the cards. These changes will be made, announced, and signed by Mallikarjun Kharge, but in effect, they will have Rahul and Sonia’s approval. Three AICC General Secretaries – Ghulam Ahmad Mir, Deepa Dasmunshi, and Randeep Singh Surjewala – are set to be removed. Mir and Surjewala are expected to play active roles in the assembly polls of Jammu & Kashmir and Haryana respectively, while Dasmunshi is set to head the Bengal Congress unit.
Rahul has reportedly zeroed in on two former chief ministers – Bhupesh Baghel and Ashok Gehlot – to oversee party affairs in Telangana and Karnataka, two Congress-ruled states. If Gehlot manages to bounce back as an AICC functionary, it would signal that 10 Janpath, i.e., both Sonia and Rahul, have forgiven him for his defiance on September 25, 2023, when Gehlot, the then Rajasthan Chief Minister, refused to hold a meeting of the Congress legislature party. Some party insiders view Baghel and Gehlot’s likely appointment as AICC General Secretaries as ironic. In some ways, both were responsible for events leading to the Congress debacle in the party-ruled states of Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan due to their refusal to make peace with arch-rivals T.S. Singh Deo and Sachin Pilot respectively. Yet, within less than a year, they are being rewarded.
The counter-argument offered by Team Rahul is that, as former chief ministers, Baghel and Gehlot will be able to manage the current crop of party chief ministers and address various irregularities occurring in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Shimla.
The writer is a Visiting Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation. A well-known political analyst, he has written several books, including ‘24 Akbar Road’ and ‘Sonia: A Biography’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.