Is Kanhaiya Kumar going to replace Srinivas BV as Youth Congress President?

New Delhi: The Congress leadership has started scouring for the replacement of Youth Congress President BV Srinivas.

One of the frontrunners for the post is former Communist Party of India (CPI) leader Kanhaiya Kumar who joined the Congress in September last year.

Srinivas, 42, has already crossed the age bar of 35 years to remain a member of the Youth Congress. He has also completed three years as the head of the grand old party's youth wing.

Srinivas took over as the interim president of the Youth Congress in July 2019 as its regular chief in December 2020. He is keen to contest the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from the Chikkballapur constituency in Karnataka. A Congress bastion since 1977, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the seat in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in which BN Bache Gowda defeated veteran Congress leader M Veerappa Moily.

Srinivas, considered close to Karnataka Congress president DK Shivakumar, is expected to shift his base to the southern state where the assembly elections are due in March-April next year.

On the other hand, Kanhaiya, 35, was the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union (JNUSU) in 2016 and had unsuccessfully contested the 2019 Lok Sabha elections against union minister Giriraj Singh from Begusarai in Bihar.

Kanhaiya is a key member of former Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra which has already covered parts of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana before entering Maharashtra earlier this month.

The nationwide march, which began on September 7 from Kanyakumari, will cover a further distance of 2,355 km in its 3,570 km march. It will end in Kashmir next year. The broader theme of the yatra is to unite India.

The importance of Kanhaiya in Congress has grown ever since he joined the grand old party. Congress general secretary in-charge of media and communications Jairam Ramesh went to the extent of saying that Kanhaiya is the second most popular leader in the party after Rahul Gandhi.

Among the current crop of young leaders in different political parties, he is one of the most powerful orators.

Congress sources said that Kanhaiya, as of now, does not see much scope for himself in Bihar politics given that the grand old party has been reduced to margins in the state and plays the role of a junior player to the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD).

The cold vibes between him and Bihar’s deputy chief minister Tejashwi Yadav has further dampened his prospects of going back to state politics.

As such, the sources said the Congress leadership was keen on giving him an organisational role at the national level. Hence, he could be considered as Srinivas’ replacement and given a free hand to revive the youth wing of the grand old party. A decision in this regard is expected soon.