Jaipur Sep 30:- Congress’s latest in house strife in Rajasthan threatens to drag beyond the AICC presidential poll, with ministers and legislators loyal to Ashok Gehlot declaring on Thursday they would rather resign and face mid-term elections than settle for a new CM “from the traitor camp”.
Cabinet minister Govind Ram Meghwal fired the salvo at a news conference in Jaipur, saying “all Congress MLAs” on Gehlot’s side would resign again like 92 of them had done last Sunday in the run-up to the cancelled CLP meeting that was to take acall on who would take the reins if the current CM became the Congress president.
Health minister Parsadi Lal Meena had said the previous day that MLAs who stayed with Congress during Pilot’s revolt against Gehlot wouldn’t accept anyone from that camp. Pilot, along with 18 MLAs, had mounted a challenge to the CM’s leadership in July 2020.
“Meena is a senior leader, and he won’t say anything without assessing its implications. I am also of the same view,” Meghwal said.
“A traitor like Pilot cannot be accepted as CM. Only Soniaji, Rahulji and Gehlotji are our leaders.”
Before leaving for New Delhi late Wednesday, Gehlot had gone into a huddle with speaker C P Joshi and his key ministers.
Statements by Gehlot’s loyalists are being viewed as a pressure tactic on the central party leadership to keep Gehlot entrenched as CM since he wouldn’t be contesting the October 17 presidential election. Meghwal, like parliamentary affairs minister Shanti Dhariwal, accused AICC general secretary and Congress’s Rajasthan minder Ajay Maken of favouring Pilot. He said Maken did not act against Chaksu MLA Ved Prakash Solanki, a staunch Pilot loyalist, despite complaints that the latter sabotaged the Jaipur zila pramukh election through cross-voting by two of his loyalists.
Meanwhile, Mahesh Joshi who was among the three leaders served notice for indiscipline by party in a tweet said, “Chief minister Ashok Gehlot has touched the highest dimensions of morality, faith and integrity by apologising to Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Perhaps for the first time in the country any person of the rank of a chief minister has set an example of such humility. ”
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