After exit of Rita Bahuguna Joshi, the Congress is set to receive more tremor in the coming days as some other senior leaders having strong differences with poll strategist Prashant Kishor aka `PK’ may quit the Party to join other political forces particularly the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP).
After Rita, many other senior leaders have also started questioning the role of the Central leaders in the state in wake of entire power given to PK to ensure Party’s come back in this biggest state. Sources maintained that after Rita, another veteran leader of Congress in the State Assembly, hailing from Bundelkhand region, who was known to be always vocal about step motherly treatment given to him is all set to say `good bye’ to Congress in the first week of coming month.
"All the good work of party vice- president Rahul Gandhi through his Kisan yatra has gone waste due to sudden exodus of the leaders with giving a clear picture of perception that the Party is going down," said a senior party leader while confirmed that the rank and file within the party have now gone rebellion on the functioning of some senior leaders and particularly on the arbitrary functioning of poll strategist Prashant Kishor and his team.
A senior MlA of the Party, expressed that if such situation prevails then they
had to move to other parties and contest the polls. "The members of the Team PK are arrogant and they have no respect for the senior leaders. They treat workers and senior leaders at par leading to the annoyance of most of the leaders and the legislators. How could a political leader who is in the Party for the past 30 years and four time MlAs have to bear these nuisance," the legislator commented while registering his strong protest regarding functioning of PK.
He further maintained that if such things continue then all the legislators of the Party will have to find another home in the coming elections. "We are not here to get insulted every day from these youths of Team PK who have no knowledge of politics," he stated. Another Party MlA and close to Rahul Gandhi had already strongly objected PK’s move when he tried to start `Deoria se Dilli Kisan Yatra’ from some other constituency and not from his Assembly segment.
It may be mentioned that on Thursday, during her media conference, Rita Bahuguna Joshi too had blamed to some extent the team PK for her move to join the BJP. She had alleged that the entire Congress has been handed over to PK. Another party leader accused the leadership for announcing big things but they failed to implement it. "The entire media team of UP Congress was dismantled and a team of senior leaders like Rajiv Shukla and RPN Singh were given the charge of the media. They announced that every day there would be a press conference of senior leaders. But what happened, they were not seen in the past one month and there was not a single press conferences. Besides due to the interference of the senior leaders, the state media team members also refuse to work now resulting in a big vaccum to feed the party news to the media," he said.
The leader further said that the present Rahul Sandesh yatra underway in different districts was loosing its sheen as media was now more interested in giving the news about the bickering in the Party rather than about the yatra.
However, UP Congress president Raj Babbar, has expressed confidence that leaving of Rita Bahuguna Joshi will not have any impact in the party besides other senior leaders too gave a brave face to counter the action.
Meanwhile, the lucknow city congress went for an emergency meeting here on Friday at the state party office in view of the sudden move of the city MlA Rita Bahuguna Joshi to join the BJP. The meeting to be chaired by district president Bodh lal Shukla,who is said to be a close associate of Ms Joshi, passed a resolution condemning the act of the MlA.