Pilot may block Kesri from heading AICC

NEW DELHI, May 4: Sitaram Kesri may not succeed in his bid to become the unopposed president of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) bec...

NEW DELHI, May 4: Sitaram Kesri may not succeed in his bid to become the unopposed president of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) because Rajesh Pilot, who has been repeatedly saying that the party leadership should be in younger hands, plans to contest for the post.

A member of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), Pilot is learnt to have already sounded some of his colleagues about his intentions to run for the top job in the party. He is said to be quite peeved with Kesri for not taking the CWC â€“ it is the party’s highest decision making body into confidence before announcing postponement of the organisational elections. According to the new schedule worked out by Kesri and his loyalists, the election of the party president will now take place on July 11. This clearly defies the Election Commission order which stipulates that the entire exercise should be over by May 31.

For Pilot, this will be his third straight duel against Kesri. It was Pilot who had objected to Kesri being made Narasimha Rao’s successor when the Congress president was made to go last year. Pilot was again the only one who remained in the fray Sharad Pawar dropped out at the last minute â€“ when Kesri ran for the post of the CPP leader in January.

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Pilot was also furious when Kesri called off a Narora-type camp to be held in Vrindavan in April. Such camps, Pilot felt, provided a platform for partymen to discuss their problems and air their grievances.

He perhaps had Vrindavan in mind when, while speaking in Baroda on April 22, he said the organisational elections should not be postponed under any pretext and the party should hold it well before the deadline set by the Election Commission. He even spoke of a collective leadership emerging from the elections.

Congress insiders today said the decision to defer the polls had not gone down well with all those opposed to Kesri who felt that he had simply done it to buy time and consolidate his position.

“Kesri should have consulted the CWC before taking such a major step. What is the point of having a CWC if crucial decisions are to be taken unilaterally? To say that it was Sharad Pawar and Pranab Mukherjee who had asked for the polls to be deferred simply suggests that Kesri stage-managed the whole affair,” an annoyed Congress leader said.

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Some party leaders said they would wait to see how the Election Commission reacts. “To defer the polls by more than a month after the EC had already rejected the party’s earlier request is simply inviting trouble. One could understand if the party had asked for a week’s time in view of the Budget session and the Lok Sabha bye-elections. But to announce that we will complete the exercise only by mid-July is quite regrettable, even questionable,” a leader said.

Kesri is also drawing flak for packing key bodies with his own men. The recent nominations of Pranab Mukherjee and J B Patnaik to the CWC have raised the hackles of those who point out that nominated members now outnumber the elected CWC members.

Partymen feel that by rewarding loyalists, Kesri is merely trying to consolidate his hold over the party.

He needs time to sort out the mess in the Pradesh Congress Committees (PCC), especially in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar which together make a decisive section of the electoral college that elects the party president.