New Delhi: Senior Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar said Monday that the party leadership thinks he is a “dinosaur” and so decided to not give him a seat on the newly reconstituted Congress Working Committee (CWC). However, he added that this will allow him to be more of a “loose cannon”, an attribute that he believes also played a role in his exclusion from the party’s highest decision-making body.
Octogenarian Aiyar, whose autobiography ‘Memoirs of a Maverick’ hit the stands Monday, told ThePrint in an interview that the Congress leadership, including the Gandhi family as well as party president Mallikarjun Kharge and his team, consider that his “year is over” and are thus relegating him to the “sidelines”.
“It’s a reality that has just been confirmed by my not being included in the Congress Working Committee (CWC) in the rejig that took place yesterday. So I now know that the Congress party thinks I am yesterday’s man,” he said.
“It is obvious that the party leadership, by which I mean not only the Gandhi family, but also the president Mr Kharge and his close advisers, including people like Jairam Ramesh, either believe or want to believe that I am a dinosaur, that my year is over and that the best thing they can do is to keep me on the sidelines. I accept that. What can I do?” Aiyar said.
Nearly ten months after taking over as Congress president, Kharge reconstituted the CWC Sunday to include 39 permanent members, 32 permanent invitees, and 13 special invitees, including four ex-officio members.
Aiyar, who has often been in the news for his controversial remarks, told ThePrint that one of the main reasons he was left out of the CWC was because of his reputation as a “loose cannon”.
He added, however, that he felt that he still had the “respect” of the party. “After all, Sonia Gandhi has this morning confirmed that she is going to be at my book launch. That’s a great compliment,” Aiyar added.
Having served in the Indian Foreign Service, in 1985, Aiyar joined the Rajiv Gandhi-led Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), where he served till 1989, before joining the Congress. He went on to get elected to the Lok Sabha three times, served as a minister in UPA-I, and as a Rajya Sabha MP between 2010 and 2016. Subsequently, he remained a special invitee to the CWC, but was largely kept out of the party’s decision-making apparatus.
In the concluding lines of his autobiography, Aiyar writes: “My life in politics rose in spurts to its highs and then sputtered out to the point where I find myself sidelined by Rajiv Gandhi’s heirs and marginalised even in the party. But that is another story for another book” — indicating that the companion volume to the book, which will be released later, is also likely to deal with the factors leading to his diminished stature in the Congress.
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‘It’s actually freeing me’
The Congress veteran said he has no intention of quitting the party, even if he is not given adequate recognition.
“I am not going to defect. And I think the main reason I have been sidelined is that I am regarded as a loose cannon. Well, they have just cut the chain on the loose cannon. So I am going to be even more of a loose cannon. And it’s actually freeing me. So I will continue to write and continue to speak. I will never leave the Congress party. But I don’t know whether the Congress party will leave me, we will have to see,” Aiyar said.
Aiyar has been long known for his outspoken remarks and his willingness to criticise the party leadership. In 2017, the Congress even suspended him for several months after he referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a ‘neech aadmi’ (low person).
While Aiyar was not a part of the dissident G-23 leaders of the Congress, he had joined a dinner meeting of the grouping in March 2022 at the residence of Ghulam Nabi Azad, who has since quit the Congress to float his own political outfit. Aiyar also spent four weeks in the Trinamool Congress (TMC) soon after its launch in 1998.
‘There’s always been this soft Hindutva line in Congress…’
Aiyar told ThePrint that he holds former prime minister PV Narasimha Rao “singularly responsible” for pulling the Congress away from its secular moorings. “It was under Narasimha Rao that the Congress started separating itself from its strong anchoring in the secularism of the Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru kind,” he said.
Aiyar, however, acknowledged that historically, at various junctures, the Congress party had leaders, such as Madan Mohan Malaviya or Purushottam Das Tandon or Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who did not quite uphold or advocate secular values.
“There’s always been this soft Hindutva line within the Congress. And that is playing out again now. Because pragmatically, there are problems with taking a secular fundamentalist line in elections,” he said.
However, he added that the Congress must present a “clear ideological opposition or alternative to Hindutva” so that people do not get “confused”.
“When (people) are confused, the tendency would be to go in the direction of the BJP which means that tactically as well as strategically, it’s better to put forward a completely secular image than to play around with the kind of politics that the Sangh Parivar is showing,” Aiyar said.
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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