Intimate enemy

In true blue Congress tradition, the high command in Delhi has changed the party8217;s leadership in Gujarat. The Gujarat Pradesh Congress ...

In true blue Congress tradition, the high command in Delhi has changed the party8217;s leadership in Gujarat. The Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee will now be headed by a former president of the state unit of the BJP.

But that is not Shankarsinh Vaghela8217;s only calling card. In a long and chequered career, Vaghela is best known for masterminding one sordid midnight drama that brought his party8217;s the BJP8217;s government in the state to the brink. Yes, Vaghela was the agile satrap who spirited a critical mass of BJP legislators away to Khajuraho in the dark of the night, driving a hard bargain with the party8217;s top leadership, bringing it to its knees.

He was finally expelled from the BJP, but he has proved to be the rebel who won8217;t fade away. Come assembly elections in October?, he is destined to lead the charge against the party he helped build in Gujarat. He will take on Narendra Modi, a man he himself handpicked from the RSS to be party general secretary.

And what a battle it will be. Vaghela versus Modi. The shrewd caste strategy against the irrefutable Hindu card. Many believe that Vaghela is just the one who can breach the BJP8217;s bastion in Gujarat. Because Vaghela, they say, commands the loyalty of the Kshatriya community.

In Gujarat, Kshatriyas are included among the numerically preponderant Other Backward Classes; master strategist that he is, Vaghela is expected to emerge at the head of a wider, and winning, political consolidation of the backward communities in the state.

With Vaghela8217;s appointment, therefore, the Congress has obviously picked up the gauntlet that Modi and his men have thrown down in the state.

Or has it really? In a state like Gujarat, where vicious communal violence raged unchecked for nearly three months, even as the BJP government looked the other way, and where the scars have yet to heal, what does Vaghela8217;s appointment really signal?

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That the Congress is unable or unwilling to provide an alternative politics, a positive agenda to counter the politics of hate the BJP has inflicted on the people under Modi. By falling back on the former RSS-BJP man, the Congress has underlined the sheer poverty of the political opposition in Gujarat and in the country.