Bhubaneswar: To remain in Congress party one has to remain loyal to the ‘Gandhi’ family and never mess with it. Being loyal is the sole condition and you soon become an eyesore if one makes any attempt to challenge it at any stage.
If you want to be in Congress, you will have to ‘worship’ the Nehru- Gandhi family. This is the eternal truth of the Congress Party. It started before independence and after independence, it became an established truth. There is however, a little confusion in calling it ‘Gandhi’ family. This family has nothing to do with Mahatma Gandhi. In fact there is no distant relation. But this family likes to be identified as ‘Gandhi’ family apparently for electoral advantage. The Gandhi surname has given it political advantage which has been used by it from generation to generation.
This is the situation for two senior leaders of the Congress party. Both are popular leaders in their respective states and both have a hold on the politics in their states. The political competence of both of them has also been proven.
The first one is from Kerala. MP from Thiruvananthapuram Shashi Tharoor defeated BJP’s Rajeev Chandrashekhar in a very tough contest and won by only 14000 votes and got elected for the fourth time. He hails from the Nair community of Kerala.
Now call it his misfortune or good fortune that the closest person to Rahul Gandhi in Congress is from the same community– KC Venu Gopal. Hence it has now transformed to a fight between two Nairs. One a Gandhi loyalist while the other is challenging the Gandhis or at least confronting the family. Shashi Tharoor wants to be projected as the Chief Ministerial candidate during the Assembly election in the State during 2026. But he committed two ‘mistakes’–
praising one project of the Left Front government in Kerala– LDF government. The second mistake, he made was praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his recent trip to the United State and his meeting with the new President Donald Trump.Tharoor issued a statement and also tweeted on social media that the trip was very good and India got everything it wanted. However, he was critical of the manner in which illegal Indian migrants were deported from there.
But prasing RSS, BJP or Modi is not considered by the Gandhi family a mistake but ‘sin’.
KC Venu Gopal also has the ambition to become the Chief Minister of Kerala, but no decision has been taken till now by the Congress.
It is alleged that Venugopal leaked the discussion between Rahul Gandhi and Tharoor when the two met recently and the ambition of Tharoor came to public domain.
Everyone knows that Rahul Gandhi shares everything with Venugopal as he is the closest to him in the party.
, meanwhile, another thing happened. A media house in Kerala did an interview of Shashi Tharoor and ‘misrepresented’ him. Tharoor was quoted to have said in the interview that he has a ‘lot of options’. Although Tharoor denied this and the media house apologized, the damage had already been done.
As discussed earlier, if any person who is not against RSS, BJP and Modi has questionable loyalty.
But, now Rahul Gandhi has to decide what to do. Shashi Tharoor is such a leader whose image impeccable in Kerala and in the country. He has been a Minister of State for External Affairs in Manmohan Singh’s government and well versed on foreign affairs. The Gandhi family scion is caught in a dilemma. How to act.
Ever since Tharoon contested the AICC president election against Mallikarjuna Kharge, he has been the eyesore of the Gandhis as it amounted to challenging the authority of the family. Since then the graph of Shashi Tharoor is continuously falling down in the party and he has not been seen participating any debate in the Lok Sabha since the new House was formed in 2024. Tharoor did not get a chance to speak, including on the budget despite being the best speaker of the party at present in the House.
The second leader is DK Shivakumar, the Deputy Chief Minister of Karnataka and also the State President. He is considered the architect of Congress victory in the State during the last Assembly election to oust BJP from power. But Siddaramaiah was chosen by Congress high Command for chief Ministership ignoring the claim of Shivkumar. There is a cold war in Congress with two glaring factions led by Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar. And interestingly their loyalty is also to two leaders– Siddha Ramaiya’s loyalty is towards Rahul Gandhi while Shivkumar ‘s loyalty is towards Priyanka Vadra.
But recently Shivkumar committed two big sins. He went to the Mahakumbh for a holy dip against the wishes of the Gandhi family and praised the arrangement made by the UP government for the 45-day long event.
When he returned to Karnataka, and asserted that he was a Hindu by birth and will one. This was certainly not palatable to the Gandhis.
DK Shivkumar committed yet another ‘sin’ by sharing the dias with Union Home Minister Amit Shah at the Shivratri celebration organised at the Ashram of Sadhguru. The public display of Hindu faith by DK Shivkumar cannot be forgiven by the Gandhi family.
But the Karnataka leader has maintained that he was always a Congressman and will always remain so.
Here also Rahul Gandhi is caught in a dilemma. Whether to act against Shivkumar or ignore his acts. If no action is taken against these two, then the courage of other people in the party could rise causing discomfort for the High Command.
But in a nutshell the acts of Shashi Tharoor and DK Shivkumar has created a new danger for the Gandhi family.
