The Congress leadership is unlikely to remove Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda although his detractors have intensified their demand for his dismissal after the party's poor electoral performance in the recent Lok Sabha polls.
The Congress was able to win only one seat in Haryana in these polls. Ever since the declaration of the election results, Hooda's political rivals such as former Union minister Kumari Selja and former All India Congress Committee general secretary Birender Singh have been pressing the Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi that the chief minister should be removed with an eye on the coming assembly polls which are due later this year.
A reliable Congress source told Rediff.com that a change of leadership was not feasible or practical.
“A new chief minister will not be able to make any impact on the ground at this late stage as assembly polls are barely four months away”, he said.
The senior party also pointed out that they had a learnt a lesson in the recent Lok Sabha elections when the Congress appointed Ashok Tanwar as the new state unit chief on poll-eve.
Tanwar did not have sufficient time to organise the state unit. Moreover, he also got busy with his own election. Instead of a leadership change, the Congress leadership is making efforts to end the factionalism in Haryana Congress.
It is in the process of accommodating different groups in the campaign and election committees which are to be set up soon so that they can sink their differences and work unitedly for the elections.
The Congress had recently dissolved the state executive committee as well as the district and blocks panels to enable the party leadership to restructure these bodies before the state polls.
At the same time, Rahul Gandhi called Hooda, Tanwar, Selja and Birender Singh for a meeting on Thursday where he heard out everybody's viewpoint and asked them to sort their differences in a follow-up meeting with AICC general secretary in-charge of Haryana Shakeel Ahmed.
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