Exodus from Congress continues. Is grass greener on other side?

Anil Antony is among the latest of young, restless Congress leaders who have left the grand old party to join the BJP, the TMC, etc.

The exit of Gandhi family loyalist AK Antony's son Anil Antony from the Congress is reflective of the growing unease among the privileged young leaders over the party's repeated failure to bounce back after its electoral decimation in 2014.

On April 6, Anil Antony joins a long list of Congress leaders who have crossed over to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and other parties in the past nine years.

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Some of the prominent ones are Chaudhary Birender Singh, Captain Amarinder Singh, Rao Inderjit Singh, Narayan Rane, SM Krishna, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Jitin Prasada, RPN Singh, Ashok Tanwar, Priyanka Chaturvedi, Sushmita Dev, Kiran Kumar Reddy, Hardik Patel, Sunil Jakhar, Tom Vadakkan, and Jaiveer Shergill.

Among them, Birender Singh was a Union minister from 2014 to 2019 and resigned from the Rajya Sabha after his son got elected to the Lok Sabha in 2019. He is now side-lined in the Haryana politics, while Rao Inderjit continues to be a low-profile Union minister.

Scindia had to wait for over a year to become a Union minister (July 2021) as a reward for bringing down the Congress government in Madhya Pradesh in March 2020. He holds the civil aviation portfolio. Efforts to project him as the party’s future in Madhya Pradesh were strongly resisted by the local leadership.

Rane is also a Union minister in-charge of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSME) with no active role in Maharashtra politics.

Prasada’s appointment as a minister in Uttar Pradesh is widely credited to his closeness to Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, while his former colleague RPN Singh is still awaiting rehabilitation. So is young Patidar leader from Gujarat Hardik Patel.

In Punjab, Captain Amarinder Singh is considered a spent force, and after his huge disconnect with masses during his last term as Chief Minister after his unceremonious removal from the post and followed by a humiliating defeat in the 2022 assembly elections. His clout has visibly diminished in Punjab politics.

At 81, Captain Amarinder Singh has already crossed the age bar of 75 years set by the current BJP leadership for its members to hold any post in the party or the government or to contest any election.

He along with former Punjab Congress chief Sunil Jakhar have been accommodated in the 83-member national executive of the BJP. Shergill is now a BJP spokesperson, a position he held in the Congress as well.

Like Captain Amarinder Singh, former Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy is not a political heavyweight in the state. Soon after Telangana was carved out of Andhra Pradesh, he quit the Congress and floated his own outfit, Jai Samaikyandhra Party, which failed to win a single seat in the 2014 assembly elections. In 2018, he went back to the Congress. Former external affairs minister SM Krishna has gone into political oblivion and is hardly active in Karnataka politics.

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Vadakkan’s joining the BJP in April 2020 turned out to be a big media event with TV channels describing him as a close aide of former Congress President Sonia Gandhi. He is now a BJP spokesperson and a member of the national executive, but rarely seen articulating the party’s stand on different issues from the official podium.

Then there are leaders such as Ghulam Nabi Azad who formed his own outfit, the Democratic Progressive Azad Party, and Kapil Sibal who left the Congress and became a Rajya Sabha member courtesy the Samajwadi Party.

Filmstar-turned-politician Shatrughan Sinha and cricketer-turned-politician Kirti Azad had quit the BJP to join the Congress but remained associated with it for a brief period before heading to the Trinamool Congress. Sinha is a Lok Sabha member from Asansol, West Bengal.

Among those who joined other parties include Priyanka Chaturvedi, who is with the Uddhav Thackeray-led faction of the Shiv Sena and has carved a place for herself as the party’s Rajya Sabha member; Sushmita Dev, who was rewarded with a berth in the Upper House of Parliament by the Trinamool Congress, and former Haryana Congress chief Ashok Tanwar, who is now a member of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) after a brief stint with the Trinamool Congress.

While some of them are striving hard to stay relevant, there are four current BJP Chief Ministers — Himanta Biswa Sarma (Assam), Prema Khandu (Arunachal Pradesh), Biren Singh (Manipur), and Manik Saha (Tripura) — who once swore by the grand old party.

Ironically, Tanwar, Scindia, Prasada, RPN Singh, and Dev were all considered close to Rahul Gandhi, given key positions in the Congress by him and left when he was struggling to revive the party. Obviously, they didn’t see any future in the Congress.

While the loyalty of these leaders will always remain in question, for they left the party (which established them in politics) at a time when its chips were down, the exits undoubtedly leave a demoralising effect on the cadre and force them to think that they are on board a sinking ship.

For its part, the Congress also needs to open channels of communications at all levels to address the anxiety of its leaders, especially the GenNext, whose hopes have been shattered by the national party's successive electoral setbacks.

To stop this exodus, the grand old party will have to stem the electoral slide and show visible signs of revival. Serious efforts to prove that the party is on track to become a fighting fit election machinery once again will go a long way in restoring the confidence among its cadre. Unless it inspires that hope of revival, the Congress will find it difficult to keep its flock together.

(Aurangzeb Naqshbandi is a senior journalist who has been covering the Congress for 15 years, and is currently associated with Pixstory.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.