Family comes first

The letter seeking sweeping reforms in the Congress may have had the unintended impact of hastening Rahul Gandhi’s comeback

- SONI MISHRA

MISTRUST SEEMS to have been the defining sentiment at the meeting of the Congress Working Committee on August 24. At the fourth virtual meeting of its highest decision-making body in Covid times, the Congress switched from Zoom, the videoconferencing app which the CWC had used for the first three meetings, to Cisco Webex so as to make it more secure.

That, however, did not stop real-time leaks of the proceedings to the media. An infuriated Ahmed Patel, Congress treasurer and a close confidant of the party’s interim president Sonia Gandhi, paused the discussion and asked the participants to either keep away their phones or switch them off.

The mistrust was further evident as senior leader Kapil Sibal, not a CWC member, jumped the gun based on media leaks and posted a strongly-worded tweet reacting to remarks attributed to former party chief Rahul Gandhi. Reportedly, Rahul had said at the meeting that the 23 signatories of a letter sent to Sonia seeking sweeping changes in the party were acting in cahoots with the BJP. Sibal, who was among the signatories, withdrew the tweet when Rahul called him and categorically denied having said anything like that.

If Sibal created a flutter with his tweet, four signatories of the contentious letter who were present at the meeting—Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Mukul Wasnik and Jitin Prasada—were treated with suspicion by the vast majority of the participants. The intent behind the missive was questioned. It was interpreted as a challenge to the leadership of the Gandhis. And the ‘dissenters’ were attacked for leaking the letter to the media even before the party could take it up.