Congress is in a bad shape.
Reason? In Ahmed Patel’s death, the party has lost a skillful political manipulator. He was one of the 25 young Turks, including Ashok Gehlot, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Tariq Anwar, and Digvijay Singh, who was hand-picked by late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.
Soon, Ahmed Patel became an indispensable go-to-man and the biggest confidant of Sonia Gandhi. For the last three years, he had become a conscience-keeper of the party’s old guard.
He nearly had scared BJP in the last assembly election in Gujarat by employing Madhavsinh Solanki’s social engineering formula called KHAM (Kshatriya, Adivasi, Muslim) lineup.
The BJP, however, romped home narrowly, riding high on Surat, which gave the party 11 seats out of 12, due to Amit Shah’s organizational skills. This had emboldened him to plot Ahmed Patel’s defeat in the last Rajya Sabha election in Gujarat but failed.
This was evidence enough to show how skilled Ahmed Patel was in political manipulation, which was very important for the Congress, which was getting disconnected from reality.
However, he made things difficult for the Congress by nursing madrasas and making it too much Muslim friendly and slanting towards the Left, which is Sonia Gandhi-inclined.
But then, the most important lubricant required for any national party is the funds. That was the strong point of Ahmed Patel, which is why he was indispensable to Congress.
Now, what is going to happen to Congress after his demise? It will weaken the old guards in the party like Kapil Sibal, Ghulam Nabi Azad, and others. Either they will be thrown out or their rebellion defused.
This will make Rahul Gandhi powerful, which will be bad news for the Congress, but good for the BJP because he has failed to deliver against the saffron party in state and national elections.
The slide of the Congress is imminent, if not increasingly become irrelevant, as nobody in the Congress has the manipulative skills as Ahmed Patel had.