Veteran Congress leader and former Union minister Mani Shankar Aiyar has said that though he is not aware of why the Congress or its leadership "dislikes" him, but sees two probable reasons behind his ruffled relationship with the party and the Gandhis lately.
"One is a line that Sonia Gandhi made when she was asked by Saifuddin Soz, the then Jammu and Kashmir Congress president, to make me the AICC general secretary for J&K and his argument was that of all Congressmen the one who has the highest reputation as a friend of the Kashmiri people is Mani Shankar Aiyar. And Sonia Gandhi’s reply was, ‘How can I? He’s a loose cannon.’… The current Congress wants conformism and how can a maverick be a conformist? That is one part of it," Aiyar told The Indian Express in an interview.
The second reason, according to Aiyar, is because Rahul Gandhi, who is 30 years younger to him, sees him as a leader who belongs to his father's generation and may be too old to be an active politician. "But he is the leader of the Congress and I am a very humble follower. So I have no alternative but to accept the decree that I am too old to be an active politician," Aiyar said.
Aiyar says he has now become an active, public intellectual but will never leave the Congress, "especially not to join the BJP".
Reflecting on where the acrimony began, Aiyar referred to his reaction when about 76 CRPF personnel were blown up in a Maoist attack during the tenure of P Chidambaram as the Home Minister.
"I said this is not the way to tackle Naxalism. We should go back to the Panchayats as envisaged by Rajiv Gandhi and when I said this the Home Minister at the time, Mr P Chidambaram got very upset and I think his being upset provoked Sonia Gandhi into speaking extremely harshly to me," Aiyar said, adding that it was only 15 years later that he got on a one-on-one meeting with Sonia Gandhi.
"By that time 15 years ago was too long ago to waste my precious five minutes in asking her why did you scream at me. So, I haven’t found out," he said.
Aiyar further said that he believes the Congress will not reform itself and forging strong alliances was the only solution he saw for the party going forward.
"The important thing now is to do it in a much bigger scale and in a much more efficient way than a haphazard higgledy-piggledy manner we achieved in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections where we (INDIA bloc) were only 10 seats behind the BJP. If the INDIA bloc had been more carefully and for longer cultivated and its internal integrity strengthened then even in 2024 Narendra Modi would have been history. Now he hasn’t become history," Aiyar said.
Asked if he sees any other party other than the Congress capable of leading the INDIA bloc, Aiyar said: "The Congress should be ready to not be the leader of the bloc. Let whoever wants to be the leader be the leader. There is competence in Mamata Banerjee… There is competence in others in the alliance. So, I don’t care who becomes the leader because I think the position of the Congress party and of the Congress leader will always be a major one. It doesn’t have to be the only one. It will be the major one in the INDIA bloc. I am sure Rahul will be treated with even more respect than he would be as the president of the alliance."
Aiyar further said that the rollback of his suspension in 2018 may have been due to a letter he sent to Rahul wishing him on his birthday may have had something to do with it. "Although the tone was cringe, it was part of the party culture, and if one doesn’t like it, they are free to leave. And I wasn’t ready to leave."
"Every political party, organisation or NGO, has its own idiom and culture. For the BJP, you can’t write two lines without praising PM Modi… I regret to say we have had a similar culture in the Congress," Aiyar added.
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