How Mallikarjun Kharge stumbled at the very outset?

New Delhi: Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge will retain the dual post of the Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha with the appointment of senior leader Pramod Tiwari as his deputy in the Upper House.

This is in stark contrast to his repeated assertions before taking over as the Congress president that implementing the Udaipur declaration in letter and spirit was his only agenda.

One of the resolutions incorporated in the Udaipur declaration that was adopted at the end of a three-day chintan shivir (brainstorming session) at the lake city in Rajasthan in May 2022 stressed the need for following the one-person, one-post norm.

Rahul Gandhi on many occasions during his Bharat Jodo Yatra endorsed the proposal. It was considered a key talking point during the Congress presidential elections last year with Kharge announcing that the Udaipur declaration was his manifesto.

However, this idea along with the one-family, one-ticket proposal was junked at last month's 85th plenary session at Raipur in Chhattisgarh.

Kharge clearly seems to have floundered at the beginning itself.

Firstly, he could not persuade the party leadership to hold elections to the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the so-called highest decision-making body of the grand old party.

Had he succeeded in doing so, Kharge's name could have gone well in the annals of Congress history. These would have been the first elections to the CWC in 25 years.

In the history of the 138-year-old Congress party, polls to the CWC were held only about a dozen times. The last time elections to the CWC were held during the 1997 Kolkata plenary when Sitaram Kesri was the Congress president. But the Gandhi family coterie never wanted that and insisted that Kharge too should opt for the nomination process to ensure that all the "King's men" are in the CWC.

The second test where Kharge fumbled was to give up the post of the Leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. It is said that he was too keen to retain the post and had put this as a condition for contesting the Congress president's election in October last year after Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot refused to fight the polls to the top party post.

On Saturday, Kharge got his predecessor and Congress parliamentary party (CPP) chairperson Sonia Gandhi to issue an order naming Tiwari his deputy in the Rajya Sabha.

With this, the one-person, one-post norm was once again set aside in the grand old party.