Former JNU Students Union president Kanhaiya Kumar and Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani on Tuesday joined the Congress in presence of party leader Rahul Gandhi. They had been inducted at a function at the All India Congress Committee headquarters in New Delhi.
The party, which has been facing existential crisis following a series of poll debacles considering the fact that 2014, sees Kumar and Mevani’s entry as a huge increase following the exit of numerous young leaders like numerous young leaders like Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sushmita Dev, Jitin Prasada, Priyanka Chaturvedi and Laliteshpati Tripathi.
While Kumar is viewed as a crowd-puller, some leaders in the Congress think that Kumar could be a baggage for the party offered his controversial previous. Even in the CPI, he had faced a censure – a mild disciplinary action – earlier this year for a ruckus at the party’s Patna workplace in December last year.
Kumar unsuccessfully contested the Begusarai Lok Sabha election as a CPI candidate and lost to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stalwart and Union minister Giriraj Singh in 2019.
Mevani, who is at the moment a legislator in Gujarat and represents the Vadgam constituency, is the convener of the Rashtriya Dalit Adhikar Manch (RDAM). He is a lawyer-activist and a former journalist. Mevani’s entry into the Congress comes at a time when it is wooing the scheduled castes neighborhood following creating one amongst them the chief minister of Punjab.
The party could handover a essential position to Mevani in Gujarat, which is scheduled to go to polls later next year. The Congress had helped Mevani in the earlier assembly polls as effectively.
Ahead of Kumar’s induction in the Congress, former Union minister Manish Tewari place out a cryptic tweet, saying it would be worthwhile to look at the history of communists’ presence in the party. Citing a book by Mohan Kumaramangalam, he mentioned “the more things change, the more they remain the same”.
“As speculation abounds about certain Communist leaders joining Congress it perhaps may be instructive to revisit a 1973 book ‘Communists in Congress’ Kumarmanglam Thesis. The more things change the more they perhaps remain the same. I re-read it today,” Tewari mentioned in a tweet.