At AICC meeting, Selja targeted in-charge Babaria for being 'partial' to Hooda camp, even as Rahul asked everyone to work unitedly to clinch Assembly polls.
Less than four months before the Haryana Assembly elections, the state Congress continues to be beset with factionalism and infighting. As a consequence, another state party in-charge, All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary Deepak Babaria, is now facing the heat from rival factions as they jockey to gain an upper hand ahead of the high-stakes polls.
Babaria has also been in-charge of the Delhi Congress, and had come under fire amidst the Lok Sabha elections two moths ago when Arvinder Singh Lovely, the then Delhi PCC chief, resigned, targeting him for “not letting him work”.
An AICC meeting held by Congress national president Mallikarjun Kharge on June 26 to review the party’s preparedness for the upcoming Haryana Assembly polls, which was attended by Rahul Gandhi, witnessed heated exchanges between state party leaders from rival factions. Sources said Sirsa MP Kumari Selja took the lead among other leaders to take on Babaria, accusing him of being allegedly influenced by “one particular group of leaders in Haryana”. This was an apparent reference to the party faction led by Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the state Assembly and ex-chief minister, Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
Sources said Gandhi asked all the state Congress leaders to work together to ensure the party’s victory in the Assembly polls. “At the meeting of the Haryana Congress leaders held at AICC under INC president Sh. Mallikarjun Kharge ji and former CP and LOP Sh Rahul Gandhi ji, a clear directive was issued to all leaders to avoid making any public statements regarding any differences of internal matters of the party,” AICC general secretary in charge of organisation, K C Venugopal, said in a post on X after the meeting.
While Selja refused to comment citing it as an “internal party matter”, sources said the meeting saw the anti-Hooda group’s leaders questioning the distribution of party tickets in the Lok Sabha polls. They claimed that if all the senior party leaders of Haryana were consulted over it, the results could have been better.
The Congress won five Lok Sabha seats out of 10 in the state as against the ruling BJP’s five. In 2019, the BJP had won all 10 seats.
“Not only the Congress ticket distribution, but the manner in which he (Deepak Babaria) continues to ignore the party’s other group of senior leaders and their supporters were also raised (at the meeting). The Assembly polls are barely a few months away and the party workers are eagerly awaiting for it, but if the party in-charge ignores them and focuses only on one group, it will hamper the party’s prospects in the elections”, a senior party leader told The Indian Express.
“It was not only Selja, there were others too who took on Babaria. He had submitted a list of party’s new district units’ office-bearers to K C Venugopal without discussing it with the senior party leaders in Haryana. Rahul ji and Kharge ji and even Venugopal ji were quite upset with him for taking arbitrary decision and submitting the list in that manner. Rahul ji then told everybody not to go out in the media and discuss our issues, but at the same time rapped Babaria and others who are taking arbitrary decisions”, another senior Congress leader claimed.
“Recently, he (Babaria) released a notice seeking applications from party workers to contest Assembly polls. It is not his job to issue such circulars. It is the PCC’s job. It was only a few days after his notice that the PCC issued a similar notice”, the leader added.
Babaria, however, pointed out at the meeting that Selja has remained “quite inaccessible”.
In the Lok Sabha polls, while LoP Hooda, his loyalist Udai Bhan and Babaria intensively campaigned in all the Lok Saba constituencies and also joined their candidates when they filed their nomination papers, neither of them accompanied Selja when she filed her nomination. Neither of the three also addressed any joint rallies with her during her campaign.
Among the senior Congress leaders, it was Birender Singh, Kiran Choudhry and Randeep Surjewala, who campaigned for Selja, former PCC chief. Priyanka Gandhi also held a road show in Sirsa as part of her campaign in Haryana. Kiran Choudhry, who had also been upset with Hooda, has now quit the party and joined the BJP, alleging that the state Congress lacked “democracy”. At a media event in Chandigarh on Thursday, Hooda hit back, saying “Isn’t it strange that somebody has got to know about lack of democracy in the party after nine-and-a-half years? People switch parties for their own reasons, sometimes political, sometimes personal”.
Babaria is not the first Haryana in-charge who has come under attack from within the party unit due to factionalism. Earlier, Vivek Bansal, who was the AICC’s Haryana in-charge from September 2020 till December 2022, also faced a tough time. Due to alleged cross-voting in June 2022 Rajya Sabha polls in which Congress’s nominee Ajay Maken could not get elected despite the Congress having adequate numbers, Bansal was finally replaced by Gohil, who was shifted after barely six months.
However, Congress sources say Babaria’s track record is “much better than his predecessors”. With Babaria as the in-charge, the party levelled with the ruling BJP in the Lok Sabha polls. “Not only winning five Lok Sabha seats, but Congress’s vote share has also witnessed a sharp increase – from 28 per cent in 2019 to over 43 per cent in 2024. Infighting and factionalism are in every party. But, because in Congress everybody can voice their feelings, that’s why it is more visible,” another senior party leader told The Indian Express.
Playing down the infighting, Udai Bhan claimed, “There is nothing like that. In fact, factionalism is quite visible in BJP. Mohan Lal Badoli has blamed his party for his loss in Sonipat, Ranjit Singh has blamed Kuldeep Bishnoi in Hisar and so on.”