Rahul Gandhi has summoned party’s top state unit leaders for a meeting in this regard on Monday.
Senior Bihar state Congress leaders have been summoned by party president Rahul Gandhi on Monday, 18 June to decide, among other issues, who should be appointed as the new state Congress president. Kaukab Quadri has been in-charge of the BPCC as acting president since September 2017 after then Bihar Congress president Ashok Choudhary was removed from the post. The announcement of the new name is likely to happen within one week.
Former Congress MP Nikhil Kumar, who is a Rajput from Aurangabad, and has also served as the governor of Nagaland and Kerala, and is the son of former Bihar Chief Minister Satyendra Narayan Sinha is among the names being pushed by state leaders for the post of PCC chief as he has the ability to take along all the warring factions.
Among the names that are likely to be discussed for the post are of Akhilesh Singh, Ranjeet Ranjan, Prem Chandra Mishra and former party state president Anil Sharma.
Congress MLC Prem Chandra Mishra, who is among the leaders who has been asked to come to New Delhi, said that the discussion will revolve around the present political situation in the state.
“In view of the 2019 general elections and the present political situation, we will have a discussion with the party president. There are many issues like seat distribution on the basis of party strength that will be deliberated upon,” Mishra, who is All India Congress Committee (AICC) spokesperson, told The Sunday Guardian.
In the 2014 polls, the Congress had won on two seats while in the Assembly polls that were held the following year, the Congress contested on 41 seats as a part of the three party (RJD-JDU-Congress) Grand alliance, and won 27 of them.
The announcement of the new BPCC chief has been pending since long with senior state leaders seeking a more mass oriented and stable leader. “The problem with Choudhary was that he was never able to take along the other state leaders. And in his four-year tenure, he never put in any effort to build the organisation in the state,” a senior state leader said. Choudhary was appointed as the PCC president in April 2013.
Congress MLA from Bhagalpur, Ajit Sharma, said that the topic of the new state president is likely to come up in the discussion. “We got a call from Bihar in-charge Shakti Singh Gohil regarding the meeting with the party president. We will also be discussing the number of seats that we should consider in view of the anti-Narendra Modi environment that has become so strong in the country,”
he said.
Apart from Gohil, who was recently appointed as the new state in-charge after replacing C.P. Joshi, AICC secretaries in charge of Bihar Congress, Virender Singh Rathore and Rajesh Lilothia, will also be present in the meeting. The two Congress Lok Sabha MPs Mohammad Asrarul Haque (Kishanganj) and Ranjeet Ranajn (Supaul), Rajya Sabha MP Akhilesh Prasad Singh, all former state Congress presidents, all former CLP leaders, current CLP leader in Assembly Sadanand Singh, CLP leader in Council Madan Mohan Jha and former Kerala Governor Nikhil Kumar have also been asked to attend the
deliberation.