The Congress High Command has reportedly allowed VM Sudheeran, president of the poll-devastated Kerala unit of the party, to carry out extensive revamp in it for making it battle-ready by the time of the 2019 lok Sabha election amidst rumours that group managers in the party have launched a bid to dethrone him.
Sudheeran's move for an extensive restructuring in the State Congress to save it from total collapse has won the support of many leaders and workers of the party but even they are suspicious of its practicality in the context of the ever-strengthening factionalism in the party and absence of a clear roadmap for the scheme.
The PCC chief himself had got convinced of the might of the group bosses in the hardest way possible, when he had to give up his demand that leaders facing serious corruption charges should not be given tickets to contest in the May 16 Assembly election after seven days of deliberations in Delhi despite the support he had reportedly got from party vice-president Rahul Gandhi.
On Tuesday, Sudheeran said in Delhi after meeting Rahul that a rearrangement would be done in the State party based absolutely on merit and efficiency, with the clear intention of sending out a message to group bosses Oommen Chandy, former Chief Minister, and Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala that positions would not be shared on the basis of group affiliations.
Sudheeran's bid to somehow rejuvenate the party before the next lok Sabha polls comes in the wake of the devastation the party suffered in the recent polls. The party's strength in the 140-member Assembly was reduced to a mere 22 from 38 in the 2011 election and the total number of seats the UDF it leads came down to just 47 from 72 in the previous election.
The CPI(M)-led lDF grabbed power from the UDF by winning 91 seats. How abysmal the performance of the Congress was can be seen from the fact that its main rival, the CPI(M), had bagged almost three times the number of seats it had got. The advance of the BJP, which opened account in the State by winning one seat, also affected the Congress in a big way.
Several proposals to rejuvenate the party had come up at the recent meeting of the Kerala PCC executive, in which some leaders had even expressed readiness to abandon their positions. But the same meeting had also seen a focused attack on Sudheeran from the part of members with group affiliations though he and even Chennithala denied this.
"Everybody agrees that hard measures may be inevitable to save the party from total collapse after the devastation in the polls. It is also true that what we are looking at is not a mere weakening if proper steps are not devised and taken. Sudheeran wants to do that but how the "others" will respond is a matter to be seen," said a senior Congress leader.
This leader also admitted that the Congress and the UDF had lost a lot of opportunities to prove themselves as the best democratic option available to Keralites by giving proper attention to the State administration in the past five years especially in the context of the big strides the BJP had been making. "Perhaps, many of us had other concerns," he said sarcastically.
Even as Sudheeran is continuing with his lobbying to get the revamp plan implemented, the 'A' and 'I' groups in the party headed respectively by Chandy and Chennithala have reportedly embarked on a bid to remove him from the top post of the State party by convincing the high command that this was the general sentiment emerged out of the recent PCC executive meet.
According to sources, group representatives would meet the high command to demand the removal of Sudheeran. The 'A' group had vociferously raised this demand at the recent PCC executive meet. Sudheeran was appointed as PCC chief in February, 2014 directly by Congress chief Sonia Gandhi with the mission of ending factionalism in the State party.