November 21, 2024

It is clear that despite Sonia Gandhi saying that she holds no "ill-will" against the letter writers (the group of 23 leaders who wrote to the interim Congress president to take steps to arrest the decline of the party) and that she will let "bygones be bygones", the party high command, which effectively consists of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi and now in some measure Priyanka Vadra, has decided to punish them and promote others who it considers close to the family.

Politicians often say one thing and do another. Most of their utterances in public or even in closed-door party meetings but before a large gathering of party leaders are for public consumption. Obviously, they cannot show their ire or displeasure at those who question their authority or charge them with doing nothing to arrest the decline of the party in public. They take their revenge by singling out such dissenters and by reducing their importance in the party by sidelining them from posts of responsibility. This is the equivalent of the so-called punishment posting that is handed out to bureaucrats and policemen who refuse to kowtow to political masters.

Hence, just a couple of days after calling them colleagues against whom she held no malice, Sonia Gandhi has appointed Gaurav Gogoi as the deputy leader of the party in the Lok Sabha while Ravneet Singh Bittu has been made the chief whip. It needs to be recalled that these two are very junior to Shashi Tharoor and Manish Tewari, who claims to the two posts have been ignored only because they were signatories to the 'offending' letter.

In the Rajya Sabha too, the party has constituted a 10-member committee to deal with issues coming up in parliament. Although Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma (both 'dissenters') are included in the committee, the very fact that until now they used to take independent decisions means that the committee has been formed to clip their wings. Family loyalists Ahmad Patel, K C Venugopal and Jairam Ramesh have been included in the RS committee for this purpose.

These appointments bear the stamp of Rahul Gandhi. Even though Sonia Gandhi did not show her displeasure in the CWC meeting, Rahul was vocal in questioning the timing of the letter. That was just a diplomatic line of attack. Actually, he was questioning the very act of writing the letter. Rahul Gandhi has shown in the past too that he treats the party as his personal fiefdom (forget the resignations and the call for a president from outside the family) and is very sensitive to criticism. Hence, it is clear that the last of this episode has not been heard. The letter writers are sure to face Rahul Gandhi's ire in various ways in the days to come.