Congress revamp or preparation for an obituary?

When the news of union environment minister Jayanthi Natarajan’s resignation flashed in the media, The Hindu carried it with the headline “Jayanthi was a valued colleage, says PM”. It looked more like an obituary than acceptance of the resignation by prime minister Manmohan Singh.

Leaving the tongue-in-cheek headline aside, the work that Natarajan has taken up leaving her post may be a walk to the grave –for Congress.

She tendered her resignation to the PM saying that she “wanted to work for the party in the view of the coming Lok Sabha polls”. Given her party’s poor performance in the assembly elections this year, which she had been defending vehemently till now, it sounds a pretty noble cause.

Her resignation was accepted on Friday itself but disclosed in the media on Saturday after President’s assent. Now petroleum minister Veerappa Moily has additional charge of the environment ministry. (What an irony!)

Interestingly, her resignation came after Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi promised a revamp of the party in front of the media, supported by his valuable colleague Mani Shankar Aiyyar recently. In fact, the indications that Rahul had something to do with the resignation only became clearer in the speech that he delivered at a Ficci conference.

“There cannot be arbitrary decisions, whoever it is — the chief minister or the environment minister. There cannot be rent-seeking and blocking of projects. It holds up development. One cannot allow wholesale plunder of the environment. There needs to be a balance,” he said.

Last time when UPA ministers quit for the party was in June when Ajay Maken and CP Joshi had resigned. They both left cabinet and became party general secretaries. Also, union rural development minister Jairam Ramesh had quit in 2009 to help the party in Lok Sabha elections in which Congress had won for the second term.

While there does not seem to be a great work put up by Maken and Joshi, plus handiwork of Rahul, there are rumors that several ministers like Anand Sharma, Sachin Pilot, Salman Khurshid, Gulam Nabi Azad and Jairam Ramesh may be quitting the government to join the Congress campaign too.

With Congress losing Rajasthan under the leadership of Pilot, it may not be a good idea though.

This revamp process, which started two days ago by Rahul, till now have seem changes in the post of Delhi and Chhatisgarh PCC chief where Arvinder Singh Lovely was given the command of Delhi and Bhupesh Baghel of Chhatisgarh. News is that Haryana and Rajasthan are likely to be the next in this revamp process.

Although Rahul took beautiful advantage of the political situations recently (read Lokpal) after the bitter loss his party had to suffer at the hands of opposition BJP, it is yet to be ascertained whether his magic (if at all he has some) will work or not.

If the history keeps repeating itself for Rahul, what happened in Delhi, Rajasthan, MP and Chhatisgarh after UP and Bihar, will happen in whole of the country for Congress. And the real obituary for Congress will be the headline.