A Congress self-goal and a bitter fight with Centre: What a fractured political terrain tells us

The Congress should have taken credit for its most experienced and articulate voices being included in the delegations set to travel to 32 countries and the European Union to mobilise global opinion in India’s favour after the Pahalgam terror attack.

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Whatever be the Congress brass’s view about the way the delegations were put together or the “loyalty quotient” of, say, Shashi Tharoor, the party leaders in the all-party groups are, at the end of the day, tall Congress leaders. Tharoor, Salman Khurshid, and Manish Tewari are former ministers, and Amar Singh is an experienced former 1AS officer from the border state of Punjab. Former Union Minister Anand Sharma, also an experienced administrator, is the sole name from the Congress list that the government included in a delegation.

These men have a nuanced understanding of complex affairs in a fast-changing global scenario. Their inclusion enables the Congress to claim legitimately that it is the Grand Old Party of India that really knows the intricacies of “raj kaaj (governance)” and, ultimately, other parties have to turn to it when it comes to the crunch.Even if the BJP was, hypothetically speaking, trying to play mischief by dividing the Congress in the way it went about constituting the delegations, as some in the Opposition party suspect, it could have turned the tables on the ruling party by making a virtue out of a necessity. By openly opposing its own senior figures, the Congress has only scored a self-goal.