They did a Bose on me, says Kesri

This quick operation marked the end of Kesri’s 17-month tenure as Congress president. Ironically, his term had begun with a similar operation that had seen P V Narasimha Rao bid adieu to the same post.

In defeat and disgrace, Kesri invoked history and glory. “This is not the first time that an elected president is being sacked,” he told CWC members at the morning meeting. “First, they did it to Subhash Chandra Bose and then with P D Tandon. And now they have done it to me.”

They were the two greatCongress presidents of the past Bose in 1940 and Tandon in 1951 had also quit the post prematurely because of their differences with Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru respectively.

Of course, he conveniently forgot that while the other two had quit the post much before it was demanded of them, he himself chose to cling to it till the very last.

Perhaps, he was banking on the Great Survivor in him. For, with no viable political base, Kesri remained part of the party’s decision-making apparatus for almost two decades. The fact that he knew how to change the colour of his politics helped. He could be a loyalist, or a back-stabber, a strategist or a backroom boy, as the occasion demanded all through his 68 years of association with the party.

This time things were different. After all, when the whole party gangs up against an individual, there is very little anyone, including a Kesri, can do. But Kesri was not going quietly.

Forced to the wall, he fought what he thought was the “illegal andunconstitutional” imposition of Sonia Gandhi on the party. “I am a victim of a conspiracy,” he thundered at one point in the CWC meeting today. And victim he was. “I don’t have the stamina to fight it,” he admitted to reporters by late afternoon. Suddenly, every one of his 82 years seem to sit heavily on him.

His moment of despair was precisely Sonia Gandhi’s moment of glory, as the firecrackers outside the party office signified. His detractors had spent no time in celebrating his departure.

Kesri must have known it was coming. He had confided to his close friends that it was V George and his associates like Arjun Singh who wanted him out.

Till the last, he hung on to the belief that Sonia Gandhi herself was not a party to this plan. Yet, sources said, she had last night agreed to lead the party if there was a consensus on the issue in the CWC. Ahmed Patel and A K Anthony besides a couple of others even convinced her she should not postpone the decision any longer.

As a follow up, a meeting wasarranged this morning at Pranab Mukherjee’s home, in which 13 out of 17 CWC members had informally decided to oust Kesri if he declined to make a graceful exit. The morning session of the Congress Working Committee was a stormy one. Kesri, who was clearly edgy, reiterated his intentions to stick to the chair until the the AICC session was convened, preferably in August.

He even snubbed party general secretary Madhavrao Scindia for trying to rake up the resignation issue once again. “I have not resigned, I will do it only in an AICC session,” he snapped at Scindia, little realising that those whom he had hoped would stand by him, like Pranab Mukherjee, had already defected.

When he tried to meet Mukherjee’s gaze at this juncture, he found him turning away. It was then that Kesri walked out and retired to his adjoining room, to be followed by the Tariq Anwar, the only lieutenant who remained loyal. The CWC meeting continued with vice president Jitendra Prasada in the chair. As the day wore on, the old manhad a visitor around 7.15 pm. It was Sonia Gandhi, coming in time-honoured fashion, to “seek his blessings”. From all accounts, the meeting was a cordial one. Whether she poured balm on his troubled soul is difficult to say, but the half-hour meeting was reportedly a civil one, with Kesri seeing Sonia off at the gate.

But despite Sonia Gandhi’s undoubted courtesy, Sitaram Kesri is too much of a seasoned Congressman not to know that from now on his future in the party — or what remains of it — lies totally in her hands.