Editorial: After Punjab, The Gandhis Mess Up Himachal

Given that the Gandhis earlier had brought trouble for the Congress party in Punjab by arbitrarily handing over control of the Punjab unit to Navjot Singh Sidhu, and inviting a complete wipeout in the Assembly polls that followed, they alone are to blame for the current mess in the party in neighbouring Himachal Pradesh. Ignoring trouble they would have by nominating Sukhvinder Singh Sukhu as chief minister 14 months ago, both Priyanka and Rahul Gandhi slept over their diktat, thus inviting the dissidence in the Congress Legislature Party to erupt full-scale during the vote for the biennial polls to the Rajya Sabha. The brother-sister duo made the cardinal mistake of blinding themselves to the dynastic claim in HP of Pratibha Singh, the widow of the party veteran and six-time chief minister, Virbhadra Singh, and his son, Vikramaditya Singh. Dynasty spurning dynasty in favour of a commoner like Sukhu was unlikely to work. The cross-voting by six MLAs, and their expulsion from the Assembly has now further deepened the crisis. It is becoming harder for the survival of the Congress government when Sukhu sends contrary signals to the party rebels. While directing Vikramaditya to mollycoddle the six expelled MLAs, he publicly calls them cobras. Also, Singh, a sitting Congress MP and head of the HP Congress, openly warning of trouble persisting if Sukhu remains chief minister. We will know about the fate of the Sukhu government in the coming days. But what the ongoing trouble in the HP Congress underlines is that the brother-sister Gandhi duo lacks political savvy, trying to make up for the lack by arbitrarily issuing diktats to party apparatchiks as if they alone were masters of the art of real-politik.