SURAJ KUND: The Prime Minister has managed to outmaneuver his detractors and assert his authority in the party which had come into question in the run up to the AICC session. However, what he has won is a reprieve.
While Narasimha Rao took the wind out of the sails of the dissidents by talking tough against in discipline and by bringing an official resolution on the dual post issue, cracks have appeared in the facade of unity which the Congress had managed to maintain in the past. This was signaled by the open defiance of the dissidents who managed to disturb the meeting. This time Arjun Singh did not even go through the motions of paying lip service to the leader ship of Narasimha Rao which he has done in the past. Organizational differences dominated the session which had been called to give clear direction to the party in the post Ayodhya phase.
The resolution to authorize Rao to “elect” two members of the CWC was a good deflective strategy because by the time the one post resolution came for a vote, it was passed with no one opposing it as the dissenters had walked out and no one bothered to raise their hands against it. The dissenters walked into the trap set for them when they exhausted their powder a few minutes earlier by protesting the Congress president to nominate the “elected” members of the CWC.
The loyalists’ strategy, finalized an hour before the start of the session, was also to take up the one past resolution first to prevent the dissenters from hijacking the session. This ended the game of the dissenters on the first day itself, It is an irony, that the dissenters who had demanded the AICC meet ended up virtually boycotting the session on the second day.
However, by avoiding an election for the two posts to the CWC, the prime minister has shown a chink in his armor, though he received overwhelming support for his continuation as Congress president is a voice vote, he has shown himself unwilling to take the risk of an election by a secret ballot which the CWC elections would have entailed. And more so since it was he who had made such a fuss about the weaker sections not being “elected” to the CWC at Tirupati.
There were undercurrents of un happiness discernible at the AICC meet on this score and this could help Arjun Singh in the future if the prime minister makes false moves, Though Singh has overplayed his cards and come out openly as a rebel without numerical backing, the Madhya Pradesh leader’s game plan appears to be the position himself as someone who can lead the party at the time of elections with his support amongst the Muslims and the Thakurs and a leader who can raise issues.
Elections to fill the two vacancies in the CWC was the latest round of the Arjun Singh strategy and he had reportedly finalized his panel of names. Sharad Pawar had mooted a compromise for mula on the eve of the session which did not work, He had suggested that somebody of Arjun Singh’s choice could be accommodated in the CWC. But the Madhray Pradesh leader insisted on elections in the hope of doing a Tirupati which could have made the position of the prime minister untenable. The official camp responded by blocking the elections,
Even as the prime minister is being hailed as the supreme leader of the party, the real beneficiaries of the Suraj Kund exercise are Sharad Pawar and Narayan Dutt Tiwari. Like Pawar, Tiwari has also been engaged in compromise efforts and it was he who was seen presiding over the AICC session at various times, whenever Rao was not present.
Suraj Kund has seen a reversal in the positions of Arjun Singh and Sharad Pawar which existed in Tirupati. It is Pawar who is making a bid for the successor’s slot, projecting himself as a disciplined soldier of the party.
Article extracted from this publication >> April 2, 1993
