(FE)
Following their embarrassing defeats in Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand and not being able to form governments in Goa and Manipur due to poor decision making, the fault lines in Congress seem to have widened. Two of the former Congress Minister spoke against the party leadership accusing it of living in a culture of sycophancy. Kishore Chandra Deo, tribal affairs and Panchayati Raj Minister said that Rahul Gandhi had to get a dozen people around him removed. It was necessary for him to survive, he told IE. Former Law Minister Ashwini Kumar that the grand old party must accept its mistakes and take care of it, wherever the responsibility lied. Former Congress MP Priya Dutt even said that the party suffered from an “auto immune disease”, and everybody needed to rebuild it from the inside.
Speaking to reporters, Deo said that Congress had become heavily dependent on a dozen people, who had no political accountability. He alleged that a lot of them had developed personal interests at the expense of the party and continued to enjoy important positions within the party. He further added that the position change was a game of musical chairs between them and they are put in charge of one state after another. And if one took the list of these states, they would notice that the Congress had lost. When asked if Rahul Gandhi knew about it, Deo said that the Congress VP had mentioned it himself in the party meetings.
