A day after former Uttarakhand Chief Minister Harish Rawat took to Twitter to vent his frustration with his party, the Congress, its leadership is said to have reached out to him to address his grievances, a party insider stated on Thursday.
There is no official word from the party but party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is said to have spoken to Mr. Rawat after his ‘outburst’.
Mr. Rawat, along with Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Pritam Singh, Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) chief Ganesh Godiyal and party leader Yashpal Arya, is expected to meet former Congress president Rahul Gandhi in Delhi on Friday to discuss poll preparedness in Uttarakhand.
In a series of tweets on Wednesday, Mr. Rawat said that while those in power had let loose “crocodiles” in the sea of elections that he had to navigate, his own party had adopted a negative attitude.
“Isn’t it strange that we have to swim in the sea of elections and the organisational structure for cooperation in most places, instead of extending a hand in cooperation, is either turning its back or playing a negative role,” he observed on Wednesday.
‘A pressure tactic’
While he talked of taking ‘sanyas’ from politics, many in the Congress believed that it was a pressure tactic to force the party’s top leadership to declare him as chief ministerial face in the coming polls.
So far, the party has been insisting on going into the Assembly polls, expected early next year, under a “collective leadership”.
Reacting to Mr. Rawat’s tweet, Lok Sabha member Manish Tewari, who had publically criticised the former’s handling of Punjab, took a dig at him.
“FIRST ASSAM THEN PUNJAB NOW UTTRAKHAND….. BHOG POORA HI PAUN GAYE KASAR NA RAHE JAWE KOI,” Mr. Tewari tweeted, using a Punjabi idiom that meant only the last rites need to be completed now after Mr. Rawat ‘mishandled’ Assam and Punjab as the All India Congress Committee in charge.
