Bhopal: The unceremonious ouster of Kamal Nath as Madhya Pradesh Congress president last Saturday has considerably lessened the sense of despondency among party workers in the state over the party’s stunning defeat in the recently concluded assembly election.
Seldom, if ever, has the state Congress seen so much unconcealed glee on the faces of so many of its cadres before the departure of its head.
“If only Rahul ji had taken this step before the assembly elections!” was the overwhelming reaction in the Congress. Another common reaction was, “Der aaye, durust aaye (Better late than never).”
Many see the decision as a blessing in disguise, arguing that but for the party’s defeat in the election, the high command might not have deemed it proper to rid the state Congress of the two-man gerontocracy of Kamal Nath (77) and Digvijay Singh (76) given their proximity to the Gandhi family.
The duo held sway over the Congress for more than four decades. Although Digvijay Singh did not hold any post in the state Congress after he became chief minister in 1993, he continued to use his enormous clout to meddle in party affairs and influence his successor Pradesh Congress committee (PCC) presidents all these years.
Kamal Nath’s entry into state politics as PCC chief in 2017 and subsequent stint in the short-lived Congress government as chief minister facilitated Digvijay Singh to acquire more power in the party. Both the veterans tightly controlled the party for six years.
Had it not been for the Congress’s crushing defeat, the Kamal Nath-Digvijay Singh pair would have held on to their commanding position. The defeat sealed their fate.
Also read: Behind Congress Defeat in Madhya Pradesh, a Clear Rejection of Kamal Nath’s Leadership
Clear marching order
Soon after the election results were out, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge summoned Kamal Nath, Digvijay Singh and other state leaders to New Delhi to express his utter disappointment over the party’s show in Madhya Pradesh.
In the meeting, Kharge told Kamal Nath point blank that a majority of Congress workers wanted him to go.
Sensing that his position is utterly untenable, the former chief minister pushed the name of his loyalist MLA Bala Bachchan for the post of leader of the opposition, while seeking to continue as PCC chief till the Lok Sabha elections.
Digvijay Singh pushed the name of Omkar Singh Marker and Ajay Singh for the leader of opposition post and supported Kamal Nath’s request for continuation. Rahul Gandhi summarily rejected their pleas.
Kamal Nath, Digvijay Singh and others release the Congress’s manifesto for Madhya Pradesh on October 17. Photo: X/@OfficeofKNath.
In one go, the Congress high command nominated its picks for three important posts. Jitu Patwari (OBC) will be state Congress president, Umang Singhar (tribal) will be the Leader of the Opposition and Hemant Katare (Brahmin) to be the deputy Leader of the Opposition.
Direct association with Rahul Gandhi
All three leaders, aged below 50, are Rahul Gandhi’s loyalists and owe no allegiance to any stalwarts in the state Congress. Both Patwari (50) and Singhar (49) have experience working under the direct mentorship of the former AICC president. Jitu Patwari was co-convener of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra in its Madhya Pradesh phase. He also shot into the limelight in 2017 when the young Congress leader drove Rahul Gandhi on his motorbike in Mandsaur. Gandhi had gone there to meet the families of the farmers who were killed in the police firing in June 2017.
Since then, Patwari has continued to thrive in state politics, thanks to his link with the MP from Wayanad. In the Kamal Nath government, Patwari was a cabinet minister. After the fall of the government, the rising Congress star was made media chief in the state Congress. In the recently held election, the new PCC chief was co-chairman of the campaign committee. He had also been one of the four working presidents of the MPCC under Kamal Nath. Besides, he is on the panel of Congress’s national spokespersons.
Umang Singhar has a long and direct association with Rahul Gandhi. Both undertook a nationwide tour of tribal areas together. Singhar was picked up to help Rahul Gandhi’s campaign in Amethi in the 2009 Lok Sabha election. Again, it was Rahul Gandhi who recommended Umang’s candidacy for the Gandhwani seat in the Dhar district for assembly election in 2008. Since then Umang won the successive assembly polls on this seat with huge margins.
Curtain on Kamal Nath-Digvijay era
The Congress men and women seem to be happier over the choice of his successor, Jitu Patwari, than the exit of septuagenarian Kamal Nath, who is being held squarely responsible for squandering away a golden opportunity to avenge the fall of his government three years ago. His exit rings the curtain down on the era of the vintage-80s leadership. More importantly, it heralds an era of youth leadership that has earned its stripe without the clutches of dynastic, feudalistic, or money power.
The new Leader of the Opposition
The new LoP Singhar is the nephew of fiery tribal leader late Jamuna Devi who had also been in this post in the BJP government. However, Singhar did not bask in the reflected glory of his more illustrious aunty. He carved his niche in the party by the sheer dint of hard work as a Youth Congress leader in the predominantly tribal district that endeared him to Rahul Gandhi.
A former cabinet minister, Singhar is the most prominent tribal leader in the Congress. Having worked with Rahul Gandhi on tribal issues nationally, he is expected to raise the problems of the 21% Adivasi population in the state assembly with greater force than any of his predecessors did.
His deputy Hemand Katare is the son of former minister and former leader of the opposition late Satyadeo Katare. Katare junior won on the Ater seat in 2017 by election caused due to death of his father. He lost the 2018 election but won again in 2023.
Team Rahul in the making
Before elevating Patwari and Singhar as state chief and LoP, Rahul Gandhi appointed two more young leaders from Madhya Pradesh to national bodies of the Congress ahead of the assembly elections. Kamleshwar Patel (OBC), who lost this election, was nominated as a member of the Congress Working Committee, and Omkar Singh Markam (tribal), who won the election from Dindori, was inducted into the 12-member Congress Parliamentary Board.
Thus, the command of the MP Congress’s youth brigade is completely in the hands of Rahul Gandhi.
Who is Jitu Patwari?
Grandson of a freedom fighter, the newly appointed state Congress president Jitu Patwari has risen in politics from being a Panchyat member in his native village in the Indore district. Belonging to the Khati community (Other Backward Caste), Jitu Patwari has come up the organisational ladder step by step. From Panchayat, he was active in the Youth Congress and rose to become the organisation’s state president. A law graduate from Devi Ahilya University, Indore, Jitu Patwari became an MLA for the first time in 2013. He retained the Rau seat in 2018 but lost in the 2023 election.
Reacting to his appointment, Patwari thanked the Congress high command for giving a big responsibility to a “small worker” like him.
“We faced defeat in the recent assembly elections and I am aware that the Congress faces the challenge of putting up a good performance in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections. We will face this challenge based on collective leadership and deliver positive results while taking the Congress’ ideology from door-to-door,” he said.
Fear of false dawn remains
However, even as the state Congress is gung-ho about the dawn of a new era of youth leadership, the apprehension of this being a false dawn cannot be ruled out. The Congress may have injected youthfulness in the leadership, and the party may also celebrate getting the right caste combination (OBC, tribal and Brahmin), but it remains a herculean task ahead for the young trio to revive the disheartened cadres at the grassroots.
Challenge before the trio
The toughest challenge for the new leadership is to mount a narrative in the Congress which runs ideologically counter to that of the BJP.
Kamal Nath miserably failed to do so. He rather peremptorily presumed that the BJP’s Hindutva can be neutralised by covering the Congress with a similar saffron sheet. He unabashedly mimicked the BJP’s tactics of wooing devout Hindus and ended up amplifying the saffron party’s agenda. As the election results show, the voters opted for the original proponent of Hindutva that is the BJP than the Johnny-come-lately imitator that the Congress tried to become.
Legacy of timid Congress
However, to be fair to Kamal Nath, he had inherited the 15-year-old legacy of a timid and dispirited Congress when he took over as its chief in April 2017.
In its long rule, the BJP, through its persistent propaganda of Hindutva, had managed to instil the fear in the Congress that any talk of secularism would make it look anti-Hindu. The fear pervaded down to the grassroots level, so much so that whenever Digvijay Singh tweeted his views on BJP’s communal politics against Muslims, his own party workers would privately blame the veteran leader for damaging the Congress rather than standing by him.
In the Congress ecosystem, the fear of being branded pro-Muslim seeped so deep that the party’s secularist moorings got lost in the ideological confusion. Sensing objection to his avowedly secularist views, Digvijay Singh too, of late, became rather cagey in bashing the Sangh parivar.
Ideological drift went on
No PCC chief before Kamal Nath addressed this ideological drift in the Congress effectively, be they Subhash Yadav, Suresh Pachouri and Arun Yadav. None of them summoned enough courage to present the Congress as a strong secularist alternative to the BJP. Instead, they succumbed to the lure of saffron politics.
When Kamal Nath took over as MPCC chief one and half years ahead of the assembly election in 2018, his sole objective was to become the next chief minister. An ideology-neutral industrialist that he is, Kamal Nath introduced corporate style of functioning in the Congress. He succeeded to some extent. The Congress organisation sprung into life, its head office became swankier, other offices too buzzed with activity, but the cadres remained unenthusiastic about fighting the BJP on the ideological plane. Kamal Nath, on his part, was focused on a corporate-style fight against the BJP. He had no interest whatsoever in priming the Congress cadres for a durable ideological fight.
The fortuitous victory of the Congress (it fell two seats short of the majority ) in the 2018 assembly election further convinced the PCC president that the BJP can be defeated in a corporate style such as by conducting surveys through deploying modern gadgets. He acted as the CEO of a company and treated other leaders like subordinates who must obey his orders without question.
Unlike Kamal Nath, his successor Jitu Patwari is a quintessential down-to-earth leader. His political journey so far is testimony to his ability to easily connect with grassroots workers. His belonging to the OBC community could be an asset to the Congress, provided he can win over 50% of the state’s population to the Congress side on the debate about a caste-based census.
On the issue of secularism, Patwari has been quite articulate in TV debates. However, mouthing platitudes on ideology in TV debates is one thing, and inspiring the Congress workers to shed the fear of the BJP’s Hindutva is quite another.