With the Congress beset with leadership problems at the central level, the malaise is afflicting the party’s organisation in Maharashtra. Long-festering problems within the Maharashtra Congress unit came into sharp relief earlier this month after 22 (of the 44 Congress MLAs in Maharashtra) openly voiced their dissatisfaction with their leaders in the State and later met with party chief Sonia Gandhi in New Delhi to voice their grievances in person.
According to senior party leaders and analysts, these issues have been lingering since the formation of the tripartite Maha Vikas Aghadi government comprising the Shiv Sena, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and the Congress in late 2019, with coordination issues between the party brass and its rank-and-file bedevilling the Maharashtra Congress unit.
This is overlaid with the conflicting interests of Sharad Pawar’s NCP and the ideologically opposed Sena led by Uddhav Thackeray, with several Congress legislators particularly upset with the NCP’s ‘dominance’ and a lack of strong Congress leadership to counter the expansionist aspirations of Mr. Pawar’s party.
