As newly-appointed Maharashtra Congress President, road ahead is tough for Balasaheb Thorat

Facing a deep existential crisis after the humiliating defeat in 2019 general elections, the Congress is yet to come out of conundrum over leadership roles in various critical state units and more importantly in its central unit.  In the first sign of continuing operations, Balsaheb Thorat has been appointed as the Congress party state unit president for Maharashtra. This move by Congress’ central leadership comes after Ashok Chavan had tendered his resignation earlier in May after he had lost from the erstwhile Congress’ stronghold of Nanded.

A press note signed by Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal announced the appointment of Balsaheb Thorat.  Along with him, Congress also announced  the appointment of five working presidents Nitin Raut, Baswaraj M Patil, Vishwajeet Kadam, Yashomati Chandrakant Thakur and Muzaffer Hussain in the note which read  “with approval of Congress president”  without naming Rahul Gandhi. Balsaheb Thorat will be replaced by Akkalkuma MLA advocate K C Padavi as the Congress legislature Party leader.

With the state assembly elections, just a few months away appointment of Balasaheb Thorat is been seen as an attempt by the Congress to ease out serious issues in the Congress’ organizational structure that have surfaced over the past few months. Several instances of factionalism and fracture of cohesive party efforts have been making runs on the news headlines tickers, the most recent of which is the leaked letter written by actor turned politician Urmila Matondkar in which she had highlighted the failure of party leadership at local level on coordination, mobilizing workers at grassroots, failure to provide proper resources to her by the two campaign coordinators. In her letter written to the party leadership, Urmila has criticized Sandesh Kondvilkar and Bhushan Patil close associates of Sanjay Nirupam, former Mumbai Congress president.

Later, Sanjay Nirupam had hit out at Milind Deora after the letter became public. In a tweet , Sanjay Nirupam has accused Milind Deora of leaking the letter to the public, he tweeted:  “After making a multilingual appeal to the workers not to quarrel against each other, the ‘young dynast’ has planted this news to ‘stabilize’ the party. The letter was written to him on 16th May and is leaked to media yesterday. Has he learned all this from his ‘mentor’ Jaitley ?”

Internal fights and dissent have been peaking since the grand old party’s electoral plans took a nose dive post the 2019 elections results. However for the new state unit President, Balsaheb Thorat the problems are surely far bigger than just sorting out the organizational problems in Congress. BJP with its massive victory in the Lok Sabha polls would be looking for a similar show in the assembly elections; with the popularity of current CM Devendra Fadnavis on a steady rise the challenge for Congress will be enormous.

Maharashtra under the leadership of CM Devendra Fadnavis in the state has been seeing positive trends towards execution of a number of development schemes. Vidarbha, a region of eastern Maharashtra, which had for long been on the back seat of Maharashtra’s political agenda, has taken the spotlight after unprecedented development in the region after BJP formed the government in State; The National and State governments with their combined efforts have been successful in implementing ambitious development programs in the state.

Coming to the top post with deep experience with co-operatives in Maharashtra, Balsaheb Thorat has also served as Minister of Agriculture and as Minister of Revenue, and Khar Lands in the Government of Maharashtra. Appointment of Balasaheb Thorat is in line with the farming crisis agenda which Congress has been putting forward seeing the upcoming assembly elections in the state.  However, it remains to be seen if Balasaheb Thorat is successful in creating a stable organizational structure before taking on the mighty BJP-Shiv Sena alliance in the assembly polls.