Like Ashok Gehlot, why wasn't Kharge asked to resign first and then submit nomination papers?

New Delhi: The Congress high command did not insist veteran leader Mallikarjun Kharge to first resign from the post of the Leader of the Opposition (LoP) in the Rajya Sabha and then submit his nomination papers for the upcoming party chief’s elections.

This was in contrast to the condition put before Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot who was asked to resign from the post first and then file the nomination in line with the party’s ‘one-man, one-post’ norm adopted at the three-day ‘Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session)’ at Udaipur in May this year.

Kharge reportedly submitted his resignation to Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Friday night after filing his nomination papers. The LoP, a member belonging to the largest opposition party in a House, enjoys the status of a cabinet minister.

Both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha can have separate LoPs. In the current Lok Sabha, there is no LoP as no party has the requisite numbers to claim the post. As per norms, the post is given to a party that has a minimum of 10% strength of the total strength of a House.

The crisis in Rajasthan erupted on this particular issue given that legislators loyal to Gehlot were insisting that he should continue in the chief minister’s post till the declaration of results on October 19. The Congress high command was unwilling to relent and had asked him to step down first.

Gehlot loyalists claim that the Congress high command has different yardsticks for different people.

The leadership was keen on installing Sachin Pilot as the next chief minister. It was established that one of the two observers – Ajay Maken -- had clearly lobbied hard for Pilot, thus antagonising the Gehlot loyalists who later boycotted the Congress Legislature Party (CLP) meeting on Sunday.

The incident prompted Gehlot to pull out of the Congress president’s race even as he apologised to Congress president Sonia Gandhi for the incident and took moral responsibility for the so-called act of indiscipline by his loyalists.

It now remains to be seen if the decision to replace Gehlot or let him continue on the post till the assembly elections in November-December next year will be taken by Sonia Gandhi or her successor.

A change of guard in Rajasthan during Sonia Gandhi’s tenure will clearly undermine the position of the incoming party chief who will then find it difficult to counter the claims of being a rubber stamp and a puppet of the Gandhis.

Kharge, who hails from Karnataka, has clearly emerged as the ‘unofficial official’ candidate of the Congress and is pitted against former union minister Shashi Tharoor and ex-Jharkhand minister KN Tripathi.

Kharge is all set to become the second Dalit president of the grand old party after Jagjivan Ram. He will also be the first Congress president from south India after 26 years. Prior to him, former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao from the erstwhile Andhra Pradesh held the post from 1992 to 1996.

Kharge will replace Sonia Gandhi who remained at the helm from March 1998 till December 2017 and then again took over the reins of the party in August 2019, over two months after Rahul Gandhi stepped down from the post following the party’s crushing defeat in the Lok Sabha elections that year.

The appointment indicates the growing importance of south India in Congress politics and the declining significance of the politically and electorally important Hindi heartland in its scheme of things.

While Rahul Gandhi is a Lok Sabha member from Wayanad in Kerala, he launched his nationwide ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ from Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu.

Besides, the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury is from West Bengal.

It remains to be seen if Sonia Gandhi, as the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) chairperson, names someone from northern or western India as the next LoP in the Rajya Sabha. Senior leaders Mukul Wasnik from Maharashtra and Digvijaya Singh from Madhya Pradesh are the front-runners for the post.

However, former finance minister P Chidambaram from Tamil Nadu could be a dark horse if the party prefers south India over the Hindi heartland.