As the Congress Working Committee met on Tuesday to discuss the party’s strategy to corner Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the BJP, a former ally’s mention by one of the members triggered a sharp retort from the party’s matriarch Sonia Gandhi.
“He did not wish to remain in the INDIA alliance. It was for the best that he left when he did. Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge concurred with Sonia Gandhi’s views and added: “While he had not intended to bring this up, he would mention that Nitish Kumar had indeed been looking for a way out of the INDIA bloc.
Sources told NDTV that during the discussions at the CWC meeting, senior leader Digvijaya Singh remarked that the INDIA alliance should not have let JD(U) chief and former Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar leave in 2024.
“The political situation would have been different,” Singh told the meeting, according to sources present at the meeting. But Singh’s assertion regarding Kumar was promptly shot down by Sonia Gandhi, who, according to sources, said Nitish Kumar was bound to leave anyway. That was where he was headed; he had been actively seeking ways to exit the INDIA bloc,” Sonia Gandhi told the meeting. His bid to become the convener of the INDIA bloc was merely a charade, given that he had previously told Kharge he wanted to remain active in state politics while supporting the INDIA bloc at the national level.”
Reports had suggested that Nitish was also upset at being sidelined by the INDIA partners, particularly the Congress. Then Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar officially quit the INDIA opposition bloc on January 28, 2024, when he resigned as Chief Minister of the Mahagathbandhan government and returned to the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA). The last nail in the coffin was presumably the moment when TMC chief Mamata Banerjee and AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal proposed that Mallikarjun Kharge should be made the chairman of the INDIA bloc and would be the PM face in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
