It is quite extraordinary to find two senior Congress general secretaries — Digvijay Singh and Janardan Dwivedi — pose issues in public, in ways that can be seen to be mutually contradictory, on the broad question of whether Rahul Gandhi will lead the Congress party’s campaign for the Lok Sabha election and be officially named the party’s candidate for Prime Minister.
Their motivations may only be guessed at, but what such articulations clearly do is give grist to the rumour mill, and possibly spread confusion in the electorate. This has happened at a juncture when the BJP, the Congress’ main opponent, has named Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as its principal campaigner and rhetorically demands to know why Mr Gandhi is similarly not being named by his party. The sub-text of this is that the Congress is too scared to pit him against Mr Modi who is being projected by the saffron group as a “decisive” leader.
The plain fact is that the Congress has not had the tradition of naming a chief campaign manager. It is the party’s president who runs a national election campaign by virtue of holding that office, and the key office-bearers are assigned tasks for the various activities of the party in the poll period. However, when a Congress Prime Minister is also the most prominent political personality of the party, it is this commanding figure who attracts attention while the party president plays an important but background role. (Indeed, in the BJP, too, naming a campaign chief is a recent development, and there was no fuss about it when the late Pramod Mahajan and Arun Jaitley held that position in the last two elections. In the case of Mr Modi, however, the party had a problem. It could not name him the PM candidate for fear of deepening inner dissent, and did the next best thing by making him campaign chief.)
The Congress has also followed the healthy tradition of not naming its Prime Minister (or indeed chief minister) nominee (even incumbent PMs for that matter), preferring to wait for the House to be constituted and letting the Congress Parliamentary Party elect its leader (although the most viable political prospect was evident to all). So, there is no reason why Mr Gandhi should be named at this stage. As for the future plans of the incumbent PM, much would depend on how election numbers play out and Manmohan Singh’s disposition. There can be little doubt, however, that the energetic Rahul Gandhi would be his party’s most important campaigner even when he is not named the campaign head. There is an element of Congress’ dynastic dynamics at work here, but that’s not the whole story.