How leaders of Congress, SP, JD(S) were busy holidaying as parties grappled with crises

2019 Lok Sabha elections came as alarming reality check for Congress, one of India's oldest parties, as it was reduced to 52 seats in Parliament.

Congress MP Shashi Tharoor during the Cricket World Cup match between India and England. | Twitter | @ShashiTharoor

New Delhi: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi went to London, as did party MP Shashi Tharoor. Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi flew abroad as well, and so did senior leader Rajeev Gowda, a Rajya Sabha member of the party.

The 2019 parliamentary elections came as an alarming reality check for India’s oldest political party, which won just 52 seats in the Lok Sabha, but some of its most senior leaders were holidaying abroad even as the Congress struggled in the face of infighting and defections after the poll debacle.

A week before the current session of Parliament began on 17 June, Gandhi took off for London, less than a month after the election results. It didn’t help that the trip came after Gandhi had announced that he would step down as president ignoring repeated pleas from his party members to not give up the post.

Most major decisions, like choosing the leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha and reorganisation of the party, were put on the backburner as the party attempted to coax, cajole and convince Gandhi not to quit.

In the meantime, several Congress units began disintegrating. Without clear leadership in Delhi, the party struggled with defections and infighting in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Maharashtra, Delhi and Telangana. Gandhi returned the day the Parliament session began.

Tharoor, meanwhile, took off for a weekend trip to England last week, where he put on his writer’s hat to speak at a literary festival and also caught the India-England cricket World Cup game at Edgbaston Sunday.

Spent the weekend in theUK —- 2 speeches at #bradfordlitfest yesterday &the rather disappointing #CWC19 IndvEng match today (here I am in the team’s new colours!) The match had its moments (though selfie-seekers ensured I missed some of them!) but it petered out in an anti-climax pic.twitter.com/mQWqRxNItN

— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) June 30, 2019

Congress Rajya Sabha member Abhishek Manu Singhvi spent two weeks abroad between 15 and 30 June, even as the monsoon session continued in Parliament. His Rajya Sabha colleague Gowda did the same: He flew to California in the second week of June for his son’s convocation, and returned only on the 26th.

The Congress in-charge for western UP, Jyotiraditya Scindia, had flown to the US in May, a few days before the election results, to attend his son’s convocation at Yale University. Scindia, who lost his family’s bastion Guna in the election, did not return for a couple of weeks after the results.

Others abroad

The travel bug doesn’t seem to have spared other opposition leaders either, despite their poor showing in the face of the BJP’s overwhelming victory with 303 of the 542 Lok Sabha seats that voted in the April-May election (the poll was cancelled in one seat).

In Karnataka, where the Congress-JD(S) alliance is already on a sticky wicket, two legislators quit the Congress Monday. Even as the alliance looks to be crumbling, Chief Minister H.D. Kumaraswamy left for the US on 28 June, apparently to break ground for a Kalabhairaveshwara temple for the Vokkaliga community.

Kumaraswamy is slated to return on 5 July.

The Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) together won only 15 of UP’s 80 seats despite their surprise alliance, which has now ended. But SP chief Akhilesh Yadav, in keeping with his birthday tradition, took off for London on 21 or 22 June for his birthday, which was on 1 July. He is scheduled to return later this week.

In the interim, while the SP has been holding meeting after meeting for 12 upcoming assembly bypolls in Uttar Pradesh, no decision can be finalised until they get a go-ahead from Yadav.

The curious case of Tejashwi Yadav

On 28 May, the leader of opposition in the Bihar assembly, Tejashwi Yadav, fell off the radar. For nearly a month, no one knew where he was, until he reappeared on Twitter and said he had been seeking treatment for a knee ligament (ACL) injury. He was reportedly in Delhi for the treatment.

However, RJD leader Raghuvansh Prasad Singh had earlier told ANI that Yadav “may be in England”. “I don’t know exactly where Tejashwi is. Maybe he has gone to watch the World Cup. I am not sure about it,” Singh was quoted as saying.

The RJD failed to win even one seat in the Lok Sabha this election. Worse, Tejashwi’s absence came as Bihar is facing one of the worst health crises ever, with 180 children dying of Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES).

On Monday, during the Bihar assembly’s monsoon session, the treasury benches allowed a rare adjournment motion on the AES deaths.

Adjournment motions are an opportunity for the opposition to censure the government on its lapses, but Tejashwi, the son of RJD chief Lalu Prasad Yadav, wasn’t present in the House despite his home being less than a kilometre from the assembly building in Patna.