The battle between Young Turks and the Old Guard — or the Old Guard and the Older Guard, with one section using the shoulders of relatively low-profile young Congress secretaries to fire their guns from — continues to simmer within the Congress.
On Wednesday, days after the two sides clashed, each telling the other in writing not to air their views through the media, senior Congress leader and Rajya Sabha MP Satyavrat Chaturvedi spoke out. He told a news channel that he intended to quit active politics in January 2015 when he would turn 65. The young party secretaries who have been spearheading the “defend Rahul Gandhi campaign” have called a meeting on Saturday inviting all fellow secretaries.
This comes against the backdrop of the so-called Young Turks — Shakeel Ahmed Khan, Harish Choudhury, Suraj Hegde etc. — taking umbrage at party general secretary Janardan Dwivedi’s public statement that politicians after they cross a certain age should quit “active” politics, and another party general secretary Digvijaya Singh saying that the party vice president’s silence on critical issues had contributed to the party’s loss in the “war of perception”.
The young leaders chose to write a letter to Mr. Dwivedi, expressing their unhappiness with their seniors for publicly airing their views on the organisation and thus harming it. Within hours, the latter hit back in a counter-gag order, advising the youthful functionaries “that in future they should also refrain from giving such advice publicly through media”.
Three months after the Congress plunged to a historic low in the general election, the tussle grows stronger between those who have hitched their star to party vice president Rahul Gandhi and those who anticipate they could soon lose their posts in case the generational shift takes place.
Even though it is being described as a face-off between the Young Turks and the Old Guard, it is, in fact, more complicated. None of the well-known young leaders — those who were ministers in the last government, such as Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, Jitin Prasada, Milind Deora or RPN Singh or indeed, ex-MPs Meenakshi Natarajan or Priya Dutta — are involved in the exercise.
Party sources said that the secretaries who have chosen to take on their seniors must have done so at the behest of someone more powerful in the AICC system, hinting that it could be 69-year-old general secretary Madhusudan Mistry, one of Rahul Gandhi’s favourites.
Mr. Mistry, it may be recalled, had publicly taken on Mr. Dwivedi and another general secretary Digvijaya Singh on August 28, asking why they had been critical of the party in public when they had access to the top leadership.
Clearly, this battle is far from over.
