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Rahul and Priyanka meet Pilot amid Raj rumblings
The meeting went for an hour and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra also joined the meeting at Rahul’s residential office at Tughlaq Lane.
In a signal that the Congress has started moving fast to resolve the Rajasthan tangle, party leader Rahul Gandhi met the state’s former deputy chief minister Sachin Pilot in New Delhi on Friday, their second meeting in a week.
While both sides remained tight-lipped about what transpired during the meeting, two senior Congress leaders maintained that it was a “good meeting” and went in the “right direction”.
“We expect the effects of the meeting can be visible in next few days,” said a senior Congress functionary indicating that some of Pilot’s sympathisers might be relocated in different governmental positions in Rajasthan soon, as the first step.
A senior leader familiar with the development said Rahul and Priyanka want Pilot (44) to take charge of Gujarat campaign before moving back to Rajasthan. Gujarat is facing elections in late 2022. A second Congress leader expressed doubt over Pilot taking charge of managing all aspects of the Congress in Gujarat. “He (Pilot) can go there for campaigning. But giving Pilot full charge of Gujarat is unlikely. He needs to go back to Rajasthan to improve our prospects for the next Lok Sabha polls,” said the leader.
The meeting went for an hour and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra also joined the meeting at Rahul’s residential office at Tughlaq Lane. Rahul Gandhi and Pilot also met on September 17. That meeting, too, went on for an hour and the two leaders discussed both the Rajasthan situation as well as the larger goals of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.
On Friday, too, the two leaders went into a huddle to discuss the political situation in the state as well as the larger 2024 goals.
A senior Congress leader said that after the Punjab crisis is resolved, Gandhi’s main focus in Rajasthan as it is one of the six states where the Congress and BJP will fight in a bipolar election and the party needs to improve its tally if it wishes to form an alternative government in the next national elections.
According to Congress leaders in Rajasthan, Rahul also met state health minister Raghu Sharma, who is considered close to chief minister Ashok Gehlot, who has been homebound for some months now; first because of Covid and then heart ailment.
Pilot did not respond to text messages or calls.
A state minister close to chief minister Ashok Gehlot said meetings with senior leaders are a general affair. “What the leadership did in Punjab cannot be implemented in Rajasthan due to different political scenarios. Certainly, the long-pending political appointment and changes in the cabinet will be happening – hopefully after October 5,” he said, requesting anonymity.
For a year, chief minister Ashok Gehlot and former deputy CM Sachin Pilot have been at loggerheads. A compromise formula worked out by the party’s central leadership is yet to bring in a thaw in the relationship, with many lawmakers upset about a promised cabinet reshuffle, which is the lynchpin of the compromise formula, taking longer to materialise.
