Will Ajay Maken Prove to be the Saviour of Congress?

By Deepak Parvatiyar

January 24, 2015

On January 13, the Congress high command appointed the party general secretary, Ajay Maken, as the chairman of the party’s campaign committee for the Delhi elections. The decision was made considerably late given the fact that the election was less than a month away.

The appointment of Maken signified two distinct attributes:

1. The Party’s unflinching faith in Maken’s ability to work and deliver under tight deadlines

2. The dawn of new Congress leadership in Delhi after the legacy of three-time Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit.

Ajay Maken Faces Tough External and Internal Challenges

Maken’s elevation though resulted in stiff resistance from none other than the Delhi Congress president Arvinder Singh Lovely, who in protest even withdrew from contesting the election. Obviously, it was baptism by fire for Maken, a former Union minister who incidentally also happened to be the youngest Speaker of the Delhi legislative Assembly in 2003. Now, the challenge to him is not just to draw strategies for Congress victories against a formidable Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and a combative Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in the Delhi elections, but to quell dissidence within his own party as well.

The bespectacled leader climbed the rungs of the Congress through students’ politics – being the president of the Delhi University Students’ Union in 1985. He has an onerous task in hand – not just to revive the Congress in Delhi but also in the process, to re-establish the supremacy of the ‘G’ family within the Grand Old Party.

Internal Discontent in the Congress over Ticket Distribution

At the moment though, things appear far too complicated for him. While the party’s campaign has been a low key affair and lags behind quite a few paces behind the high decibel campaigns of the AAP and the BJP, he a needs to quickly devise an effective campaign strategy.

Just consider that there is much discontentment among the Congress members over the way the party tickets have been distributed by overlooking protests from party workers. There are reports of the party workers being demoralised over the Congress fielding ‘weak’ candidates such as CP Mittal (from Tughlakabad), Sachin Bidhuri (from Hari Nagar) and Vishnu Agarwal (from Sangam Vihar), who were unable to win even the Corporation elections.

Onus on Maken to Rescue the Congress in Delhi Polls 2015

The immediate past record of the Congress too portends more trouble for Maken. In last year’s Assembly elections, the party could win just eight of the 70 seats – a loss of 41 seats from the 2008 state elections. In the last General Elections, while all the seven sitting Congress MPs had lost their seats to the BJP, the Congress could not even come second, as the contest had become a BJP versus AAP affair.

Considering that the Congress bigwigs including party president Sonia Gandhi and party vice president Rahul Gandhi haven’t even campaigned in Delhi thus far, it is ostensibly clear that the onus is now totally on Maken to lead the Congress to an impressive show at the hustings in Delhi.

He has taken some initiatives such as planning roadshows, and daring the AAP’s as well as the BJP’s CM candidates – Arvind Kejriwal and Kiran Bedi respectively – for a debate on every issue pertaining to Delhi, the moves seem to be rather too late. Obviously, to deliver the goods, he needs to depend largely on the party heavyweights such as former Delhi ministers Dr. AK Walia, Raj Kumar Chauhan, to name a few, who have been given tickets again despite their loss last time. Besides, the party has retained all the eight winning candidates of last elections.

Can Ajay Maken Lead from the Front and Deliver?

To Maken’s favour, he has been a Delhi-bred politician who not only held various positions in the Delhi government in the past, but also represented the prestigious New Delhi parliamentary constituency in the Lok Sabha as well before he was defeated in the last general elections. He knows the Delhi politics inside out. But can he deliver at a time when the Congress’s fortunes have hit the rock bottom and those of BJP and AAP are on a surge?

The time is running out for him. Besides stepping up the campaign, he also needs to ensure a micro-level approach down to the polling booth. In nutshell, he needs to lead from the front. What favours the 50-year-old is his loyalty to the Gandhi family. He had taken a U-turn after Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi, after dramatically entering a press conference, had criticised a government ordinance that Maken was defending. The ordinance negated a Supreme Court’s ruling that convicted lawmakers cannot continue in office. On 15 January last year, he as the Congress general secretary, had unveiled the Congress’s poster that featured Rahul Gandhi as an anti-corruption crusader.

Hence he could well survive the attacks in case the party fails to recover grounds in Delhi.  After all, still young, he remains a bright prospect for the party. In any case, another defeat in the hustings could not mean end of the road for the Congress, because in politics no party can be written off. After all, there are examples of phoenix-like rises of politicians and political parties as well. Consider how Indira Gandhi regained power just three years after being decimated in 1977. After all, isn’t politics the art of the possible?