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Congress has to be at the head of any opposition front for 2019, says Digvijaya Singh

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Singh said 2019 would be a battle between former RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar’s ideology and Mahatma Gandhi’s.

New Delhi: What happened in the 1990s is going to stay in the 1990s, at least if the Congress has its way.

Senior party leader Digvijaya Singh has ruled out the Congress playing a supporting role in an opposition alliance, saying it would pilot any such coalition.

“The body wags the tail, the tail cannot wag the body,” Singh said at ThePrint’s ‘Off The Cuff’ Monday evening. He was in conversation with ThePrint Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta and Editor (Politics) D.K. Singh.

The Congress general secretary and former Madhya Pradesh chief minister was responding to a question on whether the Congress would be ready to play a smaller role in an opposition coalition, like it did twice in the 1990s, in the larger opposition interest of defeating the BJP.

“The Congress is the major political party, which no one can ignore. Therefore, any opposition formation has to happen under the leadership of Congress,” Singh said.

Singh said 2019 would be a battle of former RSS chief M.S. Golwalkar’s ideology versus Mahatma Gandhi’s.

“There is a clear division among political parties on ideologies. On one side it is the BJP, and on the other, the idea of inclusive politics followed by the Congress and regional parties such as TMC, SP, RJD, NCP and others,” he said. “All these parties follow the Gandhi-Nehruvian ideology. So, it’s a choice between Golwalkar and Gandhi.”

However, he added that not just communal Hindus, the Congress was also against communal Muslims. This is why, he said, the party should not ally with the likes of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen MP Asaduddin Owaisi.

“We have to be very clear that we will have no alliance with communal groups, Hindus or Muslims,” he added.

Singh also weighed in on this year’s Gorakhpur and Phulpur bypolls, which saw an unlikely SP-BSP alliance wrest the Lok Sabha seats from the BJP. He said the Congress shouldn’t have fielded candidates for the seats, a move that could possibly have split the vote for the coalition candidates and helped the BJP. “I was totally surprised. I don’t know why my party fielded candidates in Phulpur and Gorakhpur bypolls,” he said.

‘No divide’

Digvijaya Singh has just returned from a six-month sabbatical, which he took to undertake the 3,100-km Narmada parikrama.

In the time he was away from active politics, Rahul Gandhi was sworn in as party president. Rahul’s ascendance is said to have thrown the Congress into flux, with younger leaders replacing veterans in various positions.

Reports of an old guard-vs-young-turks battle in the party have since gained ground again, and cracks appeared evident when senior leaders such as Salman Khurshid, Ashwani Kumar and others openly came out against the decision to move an impeachment motion against the chief justice of India.

However, Singh said there was no such divide in the party. “In Congress, there’s no conflict between the old and the new. We are very happy that a new leadership is emerging under Rahul Gandhi,” he added.

Singh, who started his political career when the Congress was led by Indira Gandhi, has since worked with two other generations of the family; Rajiv and Sonia, and now Rahul. He talked of Rahul with optimism. “Rahul Gandhi…has his heart and mind in the right place. He will only get better with experience,” he added.

As for the party’s prospects in 2019, Singh said the Congress was in a better position now than it was in 2014, when it was reduced to 44 MPs in the Lok Sabha. “We are inching forward,” he said.

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