Time for Rahul Gandhi to take the bull by its horns or step aside 

New Delhi: The perpetual reluctant Rahul Gandhi is at it yet again. 

He has once again refused to take over the reins of the Congress party. This has been the Congress story since May 2019 when he stepped down as the Congress president following the party's drubbing in the Lok Sabha elections that year.

It's over three years now and the Congress has not been able to find his replacement yet, thus forcing Sonia Gandhi to hold the fort despite not keeping good health and the advancing age.

However, Rahul Gandhi may have officially taken a backseat but in reality, it is he who runs the show. Then why doesn't he come forward and hold the bull by its horns? Is it because he doesn't want responsibility with accountability?

In that case, he should step aside and let someone else assume the position. It's been often stated that Rahul Gandhi wants someone outside his family to take over the party. But there has been no serious effort so far, even by him, to ensure that the baton is passed on to a non-Gandhi.

There have been suggestions in the party that 75-year-old Sonia Gandhi should be asked to continue for some time as the figurehead while the day-to-day affairs be handed over to a loyalist.

Accordingly, the proposal was to bring Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot to Delhi and make him the working president with full authority and powers to run the party.

Many have argued that Gehlot, 71, would be a safe bet not only for the party but also for Rahul Gandhi, 52, as he would be more than willing to vacate the post for the Gandhi scion.

That way, the Congress will also seek to address its Rajasthan woes by handing over the chief minister’s post to young leader Sachin Pilot.

According to available data, whenever the Congress fought the assembly elections in Rajasthan with Gehlot as the chief minister, the party fared badly.

In the 1998 assembly elections, the Congress won with a thumping majority bagging 153 of the total 200 seats. In 2003, it managed to win just 56, a loss of 97 seats. Similarly in 2008, the grand old party won by emerging victorious on 96 seats. However, it badly lost the 2013 elections by securing just 21 seats and managed to bag 100 seats in 2018 and form the government.

As per an internal assessment, the party will put up a bad show if fought under Gehlot but could cut losses if Pilot, 44, is given the reins of the government at this juncture.

For that to happen, the country's oldest political party needs to take the bold step now or else the move might backfire as witnessed in Punjab where it replaced Captain Amarinder Singh with Charanjit Singh Channi just six months ahead of the assembly elections but failed to retain power despite the much-touted masterstroke of naming a Dalit leader as the chief minister of the state with highest Scheduled Caste population in the country. 

That said, the Congress is grappling to set its house in order for over three years now and during this period its leaders have tried hard to persuade Rahul Gandhi to take back his resignation.

While some leaders were busy in all this, a group of 23 dissenters joined hands to open a new front within the party. They wrote to Sonia Gandhi in August 2020, seeking organisational reforms, elections from top to bottom and a full time active and visible leadership.

Their target was too apparent. They were convinced that Rahul Gandhi was going to install KC Venugopal as a rubber stamp president and remote control him.    

In the process, the focus shifted to restoring peace in the party rather than fighting elections. The internal wrangling proved electorally costly for the grand old party as the dismal run continued in all the assembly elections post its debacle in the 2019 Lok Sabha polls.  

To stem this electoral slide, it is high time that the Congress looks for a credible alternative if Rahul Gandhi continues to remain reluctant.