NEW DELHI: If the Congress loses the general elections 2024, then three faces will be targeted—national president Mallikarjun Kharge, organization secretary K.C. Venugopal, and media in-charge Jairam Ramesh. Is it a coincidence or Rahul’s insistence that all three leaders are from South India? Although Kharge is the national president, Venugopal and Jairam Ramesh are actually running the party because Rahul Gandhi trusts them more. Interestingly, not one of these leaders understands the politics of North India. But if the party wins, these three will become all powerful. The face of the Congress is of course Rahul Gandhi himself. After the resounding defeat in the 2019 general elections, most of the faces who used to scold Rahul Gandhi were completely absent in this year’s Lok Sabha elections. The most important face missing was that of Ahmed Patel, who died in 2020. K.C. Venugopal tried to take his place, but being a non-Hindi speaker, he was unsuccessful.
He could not become a bridge between the Gandhi family and the party leaders In the last five years, experienced leaders of the party were either sidelined or left the party. The trio of Kharge, Venugopal and Ramesh were seen handling the responsibility of the entire election along with Rahul and Priyanka. Priyanka was active in 2019, but this time she established herself as a national figure by campaigning across the country. After them, treasurer Ajay Maken and spokesperson Pawan Khera were seen. Maken kept himself away from Delhi politics and remained active as treasurer. Khera represented the party as a spokesperson.
Kanhaiya Kumar, who is contesting the Lok Sabha elections from Delhi, and former AAP leader Yogendra Yadav became Rahul’s confidants. Randeep Singh Surjewala, who was the most active and important face last time, thought it best to limit himself to Karnataka and Haryana this time. Jairam Ramesh played the role of being more visible in the media this time.
If the team of 2024 is compared to the 2019 team, it looks very weak. At the time Ahmed Patel, Ghulam Nabi Azad, P. Chidambaram, A.K. Antony, Ashok Gehlot, Digvijaya Singh, Kamal Nath, Mukul Wasnik, Anand Sharma, R.P.N. Singh, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Milind Deora, Jitin Prasada, Bhupendra Singh Hooda, Manish Tewari, Pramod Tiwari, Praveen Chakrabarty, Sushmita Dev, Ambika Soni, Janardan Dwivedi etc. seemed to be a strong team. But in 2019, Rahul did his own kind of different politics, which increased the conflict between young and experienced leaders in the party. Rahul blamed the leaders for the crushing defeat of 2019 and resigned from the post of president. Rahul was not ready to accept that his negative propaganda of “Chowkidar Chor” harmed the party. However, even though Rahul resigned, he never left the front seat of the party. His resignation put the party in a big crisis. So his mother Sonia Gandhi took charge of the party. But the party kept losing in the states and got weaker. Many leaders left the party. The vote percentage of the party remained 3% in Uttar Pradesh. The election of the party president was held amidst controversies. The process of leaders leaving the party continued till the announcement of the Lok Sabha elections. In all, the election was limited to Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka. It will be known on June 4 how many seats the two siblings were able to win.