“The party can use me for election campaigning in Assam and West Bengal but not in my home State,” Lok Sabha member from Punjab and senior Congress leader Manish Tewari said on Saturday. Speaking to The Hindu a day after he was excluded from the party’s list of 30 star campaigners for the upcoming Punjab Assembly polls, Mr. Tewari said, “I would have been surprised if it had been the other way round.”
The outspoken Congress MP also shared his views on the “daily noise” over the leadership tussle in the State, asserting, “Those who put these people [the State leadership] in charge should fix it.”
Asked why he would have been “surprised” if his name had been included in the star campaigners’ list, Mr. Tewari said, “The situation as it has evolved, unfortunately, has made me come to this conclusion.”
The Congress leader, who was part of the ‘G-23’ group of 23 leaders that had written to party president Sonia Gandhi seeking internal reforms in the party, refused to elaborate on the “evolving situation”.
“I find it rather quixotic that I can be utilised for campaigning in Assam and West Bengal but the same yardstick doesn’t apply to my home State, where I have spent 40 years of my political life,” he added.
“I continue to campaign with full vigour in my parliamentary constituency of Shri Anandpur Sahib. I would like to ensure that the people who helped me win the Lok Sabha elections come to the Assembly as MLAs,” he said. The Congress MP has also tweeted pictures of himself campaigning with the party’s Mohali MLA, Balbir Singh Sidhu.
With former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi all set to name the party’s chief ministerial candidate during his February 6 visit to the State, Mr. Tewari responded to the question of whether naming a chief ministerial candidate would help the party’s prospects. “Ideally, in a Westminster model, the elected lawmakers should elect the leader. But this hybrid model ofa presidential style of campaigning withinthe Westminster model has created a peculiar situation. Irrespective of the ‘noise at the top’ and the daily inane exchanges, we are doing our best on the ground to ensure the Congress wins,” he said.
Talking of the public spats between Pradesh Congress Committee chief Navjot Singh Sidhu and Chief Minister Charanjit Singh Channi, the Congress MP said, ”Insofar as the noise at the top is concerned, it is for the people who put them there to handle it.”
