While Brijlal Khabri, former BSP MP from Jalaun, is UP Congress Committee chairman, former UP cabinet minister and Mayawati’s once close confidant Naseemuddin Siddiqui heads the party’s state media department.
Completing the ex-BSP troika, Nakul Dubey, former UP cabinet minister in the Mayawati dispensation (2007-12), is one of the six UP Congress regional presidents. He is reckoned among the most active of the three.
The faction-ridden Congress in Uttar Pradesh is banking on leaders imported from the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) to stay afloat.
Out of power for 33 years in UP, the state which accounts for the largest number of Lok Sabha and assembly seats, the party could win only two of the 403 constituencies in the Vidhan Sabha polls, which were held earlier this year.
In the Lok Sabha elections in 1984, the Congress had won all the seats in the state.
However, the party is bracing itself for the urban local bodies polls, which will be held in the coming weeks. These elections will not only test the poll preparedness of the Congress ahead of 2024, but serve as a plausible indicator of how strong the BSP imports are.
With the experiments, combinations and permutations coming a cropper in successive polls, including the entry of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra into the political arena and a pre-poll alliance with the Samajwadi Party (SP) in 2017, the Congress has deployed three prominent former BSP leaders in key positions.
While Brijlal Khabri, former BSP MP from Jalaun, is UP Congress Committee chairman, former UP cabinet minister and Mayawati’s once close confidant Naseemuddin Siddiqui heads the party’s state media department.
Completing the ex-BSP troika, Nakul Dubey, former UP cabinet minister in the Mayawati dispensation (2007-12), is one of the six UP Congress regional presidents. He is reckoned among the most active of the three.
Even as veteran state Congress leaders have been vocal about the induction of leaders from other parties at the cost of long-serving and loyal party rank and file, the central leadership, on the other hand, has stayed pat with the new template.
The decision of topping up the UP party organisation with leaders from the BSP is an explicit step to attract the Dalit vote.
Before the BSP leaders came, the party had witnessed the entry of a number of political functionaries from the Left spectrum as well. This was followed by the expulsion of several senior party leaders while some others had resigned in protest.
Expelled Congress leader Zishan Haider said the Congress in UP was directionless and demoralised, and the induction of leaders from other parties would not get the anticipated outcome.
“The central leadership of the party has been seized by a coterie, which misleads them and feeds them with wrong information about the ground reality. The induction of the BSP leaders is a symptom of this,” he told Business Standard.
Haider was expelled after he raised thorny issues about the leadership of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra against the backdrop of the Congress’s debacle in the 2022 assembly polls.
He said the BSP leaders who had joined the Congress had failed to perform in their earlier party.
Wrangling in the Congress is happening ahead of the urban local bodies elections, which are being reckoned as semi-final before the 2024 Lok Sabha battle.
Senior UP Congress leader Devendra Pratap Singh said the party decided not to contest the parliamentary and assembly bypolls to preserve energy for the local bodies elections.
“The Congress leadership has taken a good decision by inducting leaders from other outfits if they espouse our core ideologies and strengthen our organisational setup. These leaders are diligently working to usher in a turnaround for the party in the state elections … we are confident of a good performance in the UP civic polls,” he underlined.
Interestingly, the visits of Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Congress general secretary in charge of UP, to the state unit have become few and far between, which weakens the party’s efforts in cornering the ruling BJP on various matters.
UP BJP secretary Chandra Mohan Singh has said the people of the state have decisively rejected the Congress, and the party is now bereft of leaders and cadres, and that’s why it is compelled to look elsewhere for key functionaries.
“The people of UP are firmly with the BJP and the leadership of Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. In such a scenario, the Congress is forced to experiment with its organisational setup,” he added.
