Nagaland Congress chief’s criticism after yet another defeat reveals growing resentment against the general secretary entrusted with 10 states.
New Delhi: The Congress’s latest round of election defeats has put an uncomfortable spotlight on Rahul Gandhi’s most trusted lieutenant, C.P. Joshi, the general secretary in charge of the eight northeastern states as well as Bihar, West Bengal, and the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
Joshi’s charge of 10 states makes him an exception to the Congress chief’s ‘one general secretary, one state’ policy. But after the latest defeats, the knives are out.
Nagaland Congress president Kewe Khape Therie has become the first active party leader to demand his resignation as general secretary in charge of the northeast.
According to Therie, he had informed previous Congress president Sonia Gandhi in August 2017 of the party’s condition in the state. However, nothing was done.
Joshi, he said, visited the state just once, this January, after being tasked with Nagaland in June 2016. Questions were raised about his management skills when five of the 23 Congress candidates pulled out of the Nagaland elections citing a fund crunch.
Party president Rahul Gandhi later sent veteran Ahmed Patel to the state in February, days before the polls, for damage control, but it was already too late.
In Tripura, a party worker told Rahul on the campaign trail that Joshi had visited the state for less than four hours in four years.
Party sources told ThePrint that the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT), now a BJP ally, had first approached the Congress for an alliance. It was ready to contest from eight out of the state’s 20 tribal seats, but Joshi initially refused because of the IPFT’s demand for a separate state for tribals. Discussions were subsequently resumed, but before a concrete arrangement could be arrived at, Himanta Biswa Sarma, the BJP’s in-charge for the northeast, had sealed a deal with the IPFT.
In Meghalaya, a Congress bastion where the party looked set to form the government, and senior leaders like Ahmed Patel, Kamal Nath and Mukul Wasnik were tasked with making it happen, the BJP, with just two seats against the Congress’s 21, managed to stitch an alliance and grab power.
Not the first time
Allegations against Joshi’s working style emerged in the aftermath of last year’s Manipur elections too. There, the Congress won 28 of 60 seats and had the support needed to form the government, but was upstaged by the BJP.
In Bihar, former state Congress president Ashok Choudhary said Joshi never sought a “better deal for the party” while talks were underway to establish the grand alliance before the 2015 elections.
“After he became the in-charge for Bihar, he came to the state only seven to eight times and stayed only two nights,” said Choudhary, a one-time favourite of Joshi’s who quit the Congress to join the JD(U).
“He would come to Patna on an afternoon flight and leave for Delhi by evening. He was never on the ground,” he added.
When Choudhary was made a minister in the grand alliance cabinet, the Congress began to look for a new state party chief, in keeping with its ‘one person, one post’ formula.
“I told him clearly that I could resign from the ministry but would like to remain party president. But he grilled me for more than one-and-a-half years,” Choudhary said.
Choudhary left the party with three Congress MLCs, and with some party MLAs likely to cross-vote for a JD(U) candidate in this month’s Rajya Sabha election, the party may be headed for another debacle.
Joshi’s biggest setback, however, was in Assam – the resignation of Sarma ahead of the 2016 polls to join the BJP. “At one point, Joshi was against an alliance in Assam, saying Himanta was not comfortable. However, then we lost both, an alliance and Himanta,” a senior Congress leader from Assam said.
A senior party leader from West Bengal added: “He (Joshi) has no vision at all. He never meets or talks to party workers on the ground and takes decisions based on his own calculations. It is sad the party high command listens only to him.”
ThePrint called and messaged Joshi for his side of the story for this report but he did not respond until the time of publication.
Rise to prominence
So what is the secret behind the Congress high command having so much faith in Chandra Prakash Joshi, a four-time MLA from Nathdwara in Rajasthan?
Joshi was a professor of psychology in Udaipur before an acquaintance with former Rajasthan chief minister Mohanlal Sukhadia led him to active politics.
He became a cabinet minister in the state government in 1998, handling rural development among other portfolios. In 2003, he became the Rajasthan Congress president and worked closely with former CM Ashok Gehlot to unite the party.
In 2008, Joshi met then-Congress president Sonia Gandhi in Delhi and presented to her a data analysis as he discussed how the party could win Rajasthan. Sonia referred him to Rahul, and they clicked.
“He always talks data, percentage votes, vote swings, early trends, and Rahul ji loves all this. Joshi is also very straightforward. That is something Rahul loves,” said a senior Congress leader in Delhi.
After the meeting, Joshi got the opportunity to micromanage the 2008 Rajasthan assembly elections and the party won. However, Joshi lost his own seat by one vote and Gehlot became the chief minister.
A year later, Joshi won the Lok Sabha election from Bhilwara, and was given the rural development and panchayati raj portfolio in the UPA-II government.
Over a period of time, his closeness with Rahul got him some important assignments within the party, including heading the screening committee for ticket distribution for the 2012 Gujarat and Punjab assembly polls.
It was a surprise for Congress leaders in Gujarat as Joshi sidelined veteran Ahmed Patel in ticket distribution. The party lost the elections in Gujarat and also Punjab, which was expected to be a sure-shot victory.
In 2013, he helmed the screening committee for ticket distribution in the Chhattisgarh assembly polls, where the party again lost.
In 2014, Joshi lost the parliamentary election from Jaipur Rural to the BJP’s first-time candidate and Olympic medallist shooter Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore. However, his clout with the first family stayed intact.
Losing command
The string of losses under Joshi haven’t gone unnoticed though. So much so that a popular joke in the party is that he can only win the Rajasthan Cricket Association election. He was first elected the association’s president in 2009, and won again in 2017 against Ruchir Modi, the son of former IPL commissioner Lalit Modi.
Senior leaders in Congress say Joshi started losing his clout after the collapse of the grand alliance in Bihar and Choudhary’s shift to the JD(U). Joshi has lobbied hard for the election of Akhilesh Prasad Singh as the next Bihar Congress chief, but his name has not been approved by Rahul.
“He is bound to lose some of his work, if not all, in the next round of reshuffling after the party plenary from 16-18 March,” a senior Congress leader in Delhi said.