The seething discontent within the Maharashtra Congress over the party high command’s nomination of Urdu poet Imran Pratapgarhi as its Rajya Sabha candidate boiled over with Nagpur Congress leader Ashish Deshmukh announcing his resignation from the post of the Maharashtra Congress’ general secretary.
“Despite Maharashtra having enough capable leaders who can deliver results for the Congress, an outsider from Uttar Pradesh, Imran Pratapgarhi. has been thrust upon us. It is in condemnation of this decision that I am tendering my resignation as party general secretary,” Mr. Deshmukh said.
An upset Mr. Deshmukh, himself an aspirant for the Rajya Sabha ticket, dismissed Mr. Pratapgarhi as a “lightweight” and “political non-entity” who had lost his deposit in the 2019 general election to the Samajwadi Party’s S.T. Hasan.
“He [Imran Pratapgarhi] has only one qualification and that is he is a qawwal and a shayar [poet] …he lost his deposit in the 2019 Lok Sabha election by nearly six lakh votes and now he expects that 44 Congress MLAs in Maharashtra will vote for him,” Mr. Deshmukh, who is the nephew of Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader and former Maharashtra Home Minister Anil Deshmukh, said.
Questioning the logic behind the Congress high command’s decision to pick lightweight candidates for the Rajya Sabha polls, Mr. Deshmukh wondered whether Congress President Sonia Gandhi was “under pressure” to pick such candidates.
He, however, stressed that he was not quitting the Congress.
Mr. Deshmukh, a former Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Katol (2014-2019) during the erstwhile Devendra Fadnavis government in Maharashtra, switched over to the Congress in 2018 after lashing out at the Fadnavis and Modi governments over their failures to tackle “people’s problems”.
Mr. Deshmukh further said the party was severely hamstrung by inept decision-making and that the Congress in Maharashtra would have been strengthened had the high command given a ticket to a leader from the State for the Rajya Sabha elections slated for June 10.
He also said he would not be attending the Maharashtra’s Congress shivir at Shirdi which begins on June 1.
“Nothing comes of these conclaves…there was a great deal of fanfare at the Udaipur shivir as well. But even after that, if such candidates [like Imran Pratapgarhi] are chosen for the Rajya Sabha polls, then it is pointless attending any further shivirs,” said Mr. Deshmukh.
Several leaders and the party’s cadre, including former Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan, have questioned the high command’s logic in fielding Mukul Wasnik, who hails from Maharashtra, from Rajasthan.
Senior Congress leader and the party’s national panel spokesperson Anant Gadgil said that while Rajya Sabha candidates were always decided by the party’s high command in Delhi, all State equations used to be considered in the past while picking a candidate.
“First, these decisions used to have some logic. But now, what is worrying is that even the grassroot worker in Maharashtra is extremely annoyed with the high command’s logic… going by posts on social media, the Congress rank-and-file have this time openly expressed their discontent, which in the past they never expressed this forcefully,” Mr. Gadgil, the son of former Union Minister and veteran Congress leader Vitthal Gadgil and the grandson of stalwart Congress leader N.V. Gadgil, said.
He further said that it would have been appropriate for the party high command after the Udaipur conclave to balance old and new faces and give tickets to those with political capability and credibility who had hitherto been denied suitable opportunities.
“Earlier, I used to proudly tell everyone that we are three generations of the Gadgil family who have remained loyal to the Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi family. But today, I have started realising that this perhaps has no value anymore,” rued Mr. Gadgil, a former MLC.
