After Lingayat leaders, it is now the turn of former Congress MPs to assert themselves and demand their share of attention with Assembly polls hardly 10 months away. Leading the charge for the former MPs, was former railway minister C.K. Jaffer Sharief who told DC that their meeting should not be construed as an exercise to seek special status for themselves. Instead, this should be seen as a positive development to strengthen the party in Karnataka, he said. “We definitely feel pained when we are being ignored. Even MPs, who lost the parliament elections in 2009, are leaders in their own right. They should have been involved in the party building exercise. I too have lost elections but that does not mean I am no longer useful to the party or have quit politics altogether,” he argued.
Another former Lok Sabha member, Tejaswini Gowda was more vocal and pointed out that in the past, the Congress had involved both sitting and former MPs in the party building exercise. “Each Lok Sabha seat comprises of eight Assembly segments. A candidate can win a Lok Sabha poll only if he or she wields influence cutting across all eight segments. Therefore, we (former MPs) felt we should meet more often to hold ‘proactive consultations’ to strengthen the party. The Congress in the state cannot afford to focus only on the 2013 Assembly polls with the Lok Sabha polls scheduled to happen a year later in 2014. The 2014 general election is important as it could see the elevation of party general secretary Rahul Gandhi for the Prime Minister's job,” said Ms Gowda—who had emerged as a ‘giant killer’ by defeating former prime minister Deve Gowda in the Kanakapura Lok Sabha seat in the 2004 polls.