DOWN SOUTH

As though its bleak prospect in north India was not bad enough, the Congress is now faced with raging discontent in the south, particularly ...

As though its bleak prospect in north India was not bad enough, the Congress is now faced with raging discontent in the south, particularly Andhra and Tamil Nadu, that threatens to mar the party’s initial headstart in these states.

After the Congress failed to release the Tamil Nadu list in face of open revolt by aspirants and their supporters at the AICC headquarters last week, AICC general secretary Vayalar Ravi was sent on a fire-fighting mission to Chennai.

But before he could succeed, he got a late night call from Ahmad Patel on March 31, asking him to rush to Hyderabad, not least because the Congress is the major player in AP (contesting 34 of the 42 LS seats and 232 of the 294 Assembly seats) compared to just 10 seats in TN. In both the states, discontent over seat distribution has taken an ugly turn. Allegations of favouritism and corruption are common, but the bitterness is unusually high this time, sources said.

The Congress Central Election Committee (CEC) will meet tomorrow to finalise the list of candidates for the second phase of AP polls on April 26. For the first phase (April 20), 14 LS and 147 Assembly candidates have already been declared. Angered with the list, 20 important leaders, including three MLAs in the dissolved Assembly, quit the Congress. More are likely to follow when the second list is out.

The TDP, as well as the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS), has experienced much the same, with 50-60 rebels each of all three parties in the fray. But the crisis in the Congress is more acute because of widespread allegation of corruption in seat distribution. AP Congressmen openly talk of the ‘‘collection and selection’’ syndrome and accuse state, as well as central leaders, of charging lakhs of rupees in exchange of Assembly or LS nomination.

The same charge was levelled by TN Congress members who claim rank outsiders were given tickets for pecuniary considerations. The TN list was held up because of sharp differences over the nominees for the Palani, Tirunelveli, Rasipuram, and Salem, sources said. The differences have been narrowed but not ironed out yet.

While the Congress is a junior partner of the DMK-led alliance in TN and its fortunes depend on whether voters shift from one Dravidian party to another, AP is different.

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The Congress did start off on a good wicket here — poised to benefit from anti-incumbency as well as its alliance with the TRS in the Telengana region. But the party is in the danger of frittering away this advantage even before the campaign gets underway.