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 After reports that families of 54 West bengal BJP workers killed in alleged political violence will attend Modi’s swearing-in, a furious Mamata Banerjee has walked back on her decision to do attend the event. She tweeted that all reports of political violence in Bengal are untrue and advised BJP not to ‘devalue’ an ‘august occasion’ to score political points.

BJP leader Arun Jaitley who had held key portfolios in the Union Cabinet including the finance ministry has asked to be relieved of any ministerial responsibilities for the second term. Jaitley has written a letter to Modi, stating that he would like to focus on his treatment and health for some time. Speculations around Jaitley’s health were doing rounds for a long time. Government officials responded and said that reports on the deteriorating health of Jaitley are false and baseless, and media should stay clear of rumour mongering. Amid speculations on the state of Jaitley’s health, government spokesperson Sitanshu Kar took to Twitter to clear the air.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah held a marathon meeting on Tuesday to discuss crucial aspects of the new government and the likely allocation of ministerial berths. On Wednesday too, the duo are expected to hold consultations to finalise the Union Cabinet head of the swearing-in tomorrow.

A group of Congress workers sat on an indefinite fast outside Rahul Gandhi’s residence after the news of him being adamant on resigning as Congress chief leaked out. Media reports claimed that the workers are demanding that Rahul continues as Congress chief and reorganise the party to fight back.

The crisis in the Congress showed no signs of easing on Tuesday with Rahul Gandhi sticking to his decision to resign as party chief after its Lok Sabha poll debacle and staying way from meeting party leaders, except a few including his mother and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi and sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.

Sources said Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and his deputy Sachin Pilot went to meet Gandhi at his Tughlaq lane residence, but they only managed to meet Priyanka there.

With senior Congress leaders pressing upon Rahul Gandhi to take back his resignation and revamp the party at all levels in these challenging times, a number of allies stood by him and urged him not to quit, describing him as the “best and competent” person to pull the party out of the abyss.

The sources said Gandhi is not meeting anyone and remains incommunicado. He met only Sonia Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi during the day, besides party leaders K C Venugopal and chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala.

Asked about the meeting, Gehlot and Pilot said that they did go to Rahul Gandhi’s residence separately and spent some 20 minutes each there.

Gehlot was reportedly ticked off by Gandhi at the CWC meeting on May 25 for giving priority to campaigning for his son in Jodhpur and neglecting other parts of the state.

Rahul Gandhi met Sonia Gandhi in the evening and the two spent some time together. Sonia Gandhi came along with Rahul to drop him at his residence and spent some time there too.

The sources indicate that the state executive of Rajasthan Pradesh Congress Committee will be meeting on Wednesday in Jaipur and would endorse the CWC resolution urging Rahul Gandhi to continue as party chief and steer the party out of its current state. The state co-ordination committee of Haryana is also meeting tomorrow.

The sources said more PCCs are likely to endorse the CWC resolution, as Delhi Congress chief Sheila Dikshit also appealed to Rahul to withdraw his decision to step down, saying the party has bounced back in the past from challenging circumstances to triumph.

The chorus of voices urging Rahul Gandhi not to quit grew as DMK chief M K Stalin told the Congress president that he has won the hearts of the people, while RJD supremo Lalu Prasad termed the offer to quit as “suicidal”, asserting it would amount to “falling into the BJP’s trap”.

Tamil superstar Rajinikanth also said the Congress chief should stay on as he was a “youngster” and perhaps not got the cooperation of senior party leaders.

Rahul Gandhi offered to quit as party chief at the CWC meeting on 25 May that unanimously rejected his offer and authorised him to overhaul and restructure the party at all levels. He is reported to be insisting on his resignation and adamant on having a non-Gandhi installed as the party head.

As senior Congress leaders made a determined bid to convince Gandhi to withdraw his resignation, Shashi Tharoor, who scored an electoral hat-trick by winning from the Thiruvanathapuram Lok Sabha seat, said Gandhi has led the party from the front and still has far more to offer to it.

The Congress bagged 52 seats, marginally up from 44 secured in 2014. Another Congress leader Pramod Tiwari said, “Instead of resigning, he should seek resignations of leaders at all levels and restructure the party.”

M Veerappa Moily, also of the Congress, termed the poll setback as a “passing phase”.

Describing Gandhi as an “inspiration” for the party, Moily said it was not appropriate for him to quit his post.

“Just because (Narendra) Modi has won…that is not a criteria to leave the presidentship. After all, ups and downs are common for the Congress party. We have seen them many a time,” he said.
Gandhi should not insist on his resignation and should “continue to guide the destiny of the party and the nation”, he said.

“Apart from legacy, on his own personality, he is the most competent person to lead the party,” Moily said.

During his telephonic conversation with Gandhi, Stalin told him though the Congress party has suffered defeat in the Lok Sabha polls, “you have won the hearts of the people”.

The DMK-led front in Tamil Nadu won 37 of the 38 LS seats to which election was held in the state.

Lalu Prasad tweeted: “Rahul’s offer to resign suicidal. Opposition parties had the common goal to dislodge BJP but failed to build a national narrative. The result in a particular election can never alter the reality in as diverse and plural a country as India.”

Asked by reporters in Chennai about Gandhi’s offer to resign, Rajnikanth said, “He should not resign.”

Leaders are pointing out that the CWC, which is the highest decision-making body of the party, has already put down in writing its decision at the meeting on May 25.

Asked at the AICC briefing, party spokesperson Pawan Khera said, “Let us not indulge in any speculation. The resolution of CWC stands and that is where we are.”

Time magazine, which published a cover story before the Lok Sabha elections calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi the “Divider in Chief”, has carried an editorial with the headline ‘Modi Has United India Like No Prime Minister in Decades’.

The article with that headline published on its website on Tuesday, asked “How has this supposedly divisive figure not only managed to keep power, but increase his levels of support?” and answered: “A key factor is that Modi has managed to transcend India’s greatest fault line: the class divide”.

The writer, Manoj Ladwa, credited Modi’s emergence as a unifier to his origins in a backward caste — a factor missed or deliberately omitted by Western media obsessed with what they call upper caste domination.

“Narendra Modi was born into one of India’s most disadvantaged social groups,” he explained. “In reaching the very top, he personifies the aspirational working classes and can self-identify with his country’s poorest citizens in a way that the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty, who have led India for most of the 72 years since independence, simply cannot.”

“Yet despite the strong and often unfair criticisms levelled at Modi’s policies both throughout his first term and this marathon election, no Prime Minister has united the Indian electorate as much in close to five decades,” he said, referring to Indira Gandhi’s massive 1971 victory.

The pre-election cover story by Aatish Taseer was turned into campaign fodder and acclaimed by Modi’s critics as an indictment of him as a “divider” by a global media powerhouse. Time magazine has changed hands twice in a year — bought in March last year by Meredith, the publisher of magazines like Better Homes and Gardens, and All Recipes, it was sold in again in September to tech entrepreneur Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce, and his wife.

In fact, Time’s flagship US edition did not bother to run the Modi story as cover, and instead gave the spot to Elizabeth Warren, a candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination for president.

The Britain-born son of Indian journalist Tavleen Singh and the late Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Pakistan’s Punjab, Taseer wrote in the cover story, “Not only has Modi’s economic miracle failed to materialise, he has also helped create an atmosphere of poisonous religious nationalism in India.”

However, in the latest story, Ladwa writes: “Through socially progressive policies, he has brought many Indians, both Hindus and religious minorities, out of poverty at a faster rate than in any previous generation.”

Ladwa is the founder and CEO of Britain-based media company India Inc., which publishes India Global Business.

In Time’s other post-election analysis, Alyssa Ayres, who was the deputy assistant secretary of state in former President Barack Obama’s administration, hedged her bets on the economic course of his second term.

She wrote: “A bold economic reform agenda may be what comes next. But equally possible, based on the recent track record, might be stepped-up development projects in lieu of tough reforms, and a more nationalist approach to economic matters.”

“A mandate for improved quality of life might not imply a mandate for further opening markets. It’s a distinction that matters, not least because expectations internationally might assume the latter,” she added.

Ayres, now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, saw a bumpy road ahead for India-US economic relations with President Donald Trump’s focus on trade deficits.

The 2019 national elections may be over but the country’s political discourse is still in a time warp. The political slugfest involving former Prime Ministers, the father of the nation and his assassin had barely died down when Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel on Monday dragged in BJP icon Vinayak Damodar Savarkar into the fight, saying that it was he who had pitched the idea of carving out Pakistan from India before Independence.

“Vinayak Damodar Savarkar had first thought of the two-nation theory. His theory was taken forward by Muhammad Ali Jinnah,” Mr Baghel was quoted as saying by news agency ANI. He was addressing Congress workers on former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s death anniversary in Raipur.

“Savarkar had put forward the proposal of dividing the country into two parts on religious grounds and Jinnah had implemented it. This is a historical fact and no one can deny it,” the Congress leader said.

“He had fought for the independence of the country and was put in Andaman and Nicobar jail. Not just once but he apologised repeatedly to Britishers and after coming out of jail he stayed away from the fight for the country’s independence. He had thought of two countries, this is also historically true,” he added.

Mr Baghel’s remarks come a day ahead of the birth anniversary of Savarkar, known for formulating the foundation of the Hindutva philosophy that form the philosophical foundation for the BJP and its ideological mentor Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).

Chances are, in contrast to most BJP leaders and activists who would be celebrating their mammoth victory, glancing with pride at the saffron-splashed map of India, when Amit Shah looks at it, his eye would not fall with delight at the hue that has covered states from Kashmir to Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat to Arunachal Pradesh, or the big new splashing of it in Bengal, Odisha and North East but rather on the 100-odd seats of south India where the colour is anything but saffron.

The three states of Tamil Naidu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana have been politically represented strongly by regional parties rooted in a combination of linguistic pride and sub-nationalism, sense of an “evolved culture”, distinct movies and a uniquely local flavour of social justice and welfare governance. These factors, in conjunction, proved to be the high wall for the BJP to scale — whose perception as a Hindi party even before its Hindutva is considered for decades. In the past, the perception that it was as an upper caste Brahminical party hindered it from planting roots in a Dravidian culture.

Kerala’s strong sense of Leftist orientation and strongly pronounced secular outlook have proved to be a deterrence. Karnataka had given BJP a chance, but the leadership the party provided and the governance it offered proved a dampener.

When Tamil Nadu reeled under protests against a Supreme Court verdict on jallikattu, the BJP was not at the lead. Whenever Kaveri river water disputes erupt, the party is not too sure of its position. When a separate Telangana was a quest of its people, or when Andhra Pradesh demands special category status, the BJP has not found its footing.

Little wonder, the party was ecstatic when it found a hook in Sabarimala in Kerala, hoping a single issue would propel it to harness its strong foundation of RSS network in the state to gain parliamentary seats, which did not materialise. It was the first real emotive issue for it in the south which it led and found public salience, and it takes a steep curve ahead to harvest MPs.

Leaders are created by movements, but it takes smart local leaders to identify potential issues — the BJP has largely been bereft of both. A few leaders of the previous generation were committed to the party, but without adequate hunger, or capacity, to grow it.

The BJP has also not found such badly managed states where the economy has floundered, crime has taken over society, and opportunities lacking as is it did in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar or West Bengal in the south.

The various governments here, despite the corruption and caste riddles socio-political contexts, have delivered sound economic growth, jobs opportunities, better infrastructure and welfare that actually reaches and touches people across the south. This has meant that there has never been a strong, ready-to-eat-pie of anti-incumbency or political vacuum for the BJP to grab.

In short, the traditionally ruled BJP ruled states, or its Gujarat model does not come across as a salivating prospect or an ideal for people.

In the south, deceased leaders like MG Ramachandran, M Karunanidhi, J Jayalalithaa, NT Rama Rao and S Rajasekhara Reddy held such sway over political narrative, their party and governance, in touch with the masses and a grip on the media, giving little scope for a party like the BJP to come and disrupt.

Their ability to offer the right support to the governments at the centre during nearly 25 years of coalition governments meant national parties in Delhi wanted their support, not become their rivals.

For example, when the BJP became the first party to support the cause of Telangana, the TRS was not even born, but the alliance with N Chandrababu Naidu’s TDP meant it could never push for it locally, not when the Central government of NDA led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee needed the support of the TDP.

The Rahul Gandhi-led Congress finds itself ship-wrecked on a 52-square metre sinking island infested with snakes and surrounded by crocodiles and sharks. That’s the grim picture for the Congress after the just-concluded general elections.

How could the 134-year-old Grand Old Party have done any better than its 52-seat tally, still three short of getting the leader of the opposition status, when it failed to open its account in 20 states and Union Territories (UTs) and could manage to get into double digits only in one state: Kerala? In sharp contrast, the BJP-led NDA won all the seats in 10 states and UTs, and polled more than 50 percent of votes in 15 states and UTs.

This raises the obvious questions about the survivability of the Congress party in general and Rahul Gandhi’s own future in particular. Yes, he offered to resign before the party’s apex decision-making body, the Congress Working Committee (CWC). But the 25-member CWC, dominated by loyalists of the Gandhis, rejected his resignation. Though media reports talk of Rahul still pushing the envelope of his resignation, the question is how would it affect the party anyway?

Amidst attempts to convince him to change his mind about stepping down as party president, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday held a meeting with his sister and general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Rajasthan Deputy Chief Minister Sachin Pilot, and Congress communication head Randeep Surjewala.

Mr. Gandhi also separately met Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot at his 12, Tughlaq Lane residence. There may be more meetings in the evening even though there was no official word on it.

Though none spoke to the media, presence of both the Rajasthan leaders is being taken as an indication that Congress’ top leadership is reviewing why the party failed to win a single Lok Sabha seat in the State despite winning the Assembly elections just five months ago.

Upset with the party’s performance, Mr. Gandhi announced his decision to quit as party chief during last Saturday’s Congress Working Committee (CWC).

And in a rare outburst, Mr. Gandhi had blamed senior party leaders of putting their personal interest above party in these States. Theses leaders, the Congress chief pointed out, never moved beyond the seats of their sons.

While Mr Gehlot’s son, Vaibhav, unsuccessfully contested from Jodhpur, while Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Kamal Nath’s son, Nakul, won from Chhindwara and former Finance Minister P Chidamabaram’s son, Karti, won from Sivaganga.

The near wipe out of the Congress in the Hindi heartland — especially in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where it is the ruling party — came under scrutiny of the CWC.

“The decimation of the party in the States where we are in power is a matter of serious concern. There is need for thorough introspection and corrective action,” Mr Surjewala had said at the official briefing soon after the CWC

In a big blow to Mamata Banerjee, two of her West Bengal MLAs and at least 50 TMC councillors on Tuesday defected to the BJP just days after the saffronparty made significant inroads in the state. A CPM MLA has also jumped ship to the BJP.
BJP leader Mukul Roy’s son Subhrangshu, who was suspended by the Trinamool for six years for “demeaning the party”, Trinamool MLA Tusharkanti Bhattacharya and CPM legislator Debendra Nath Roy are among those who have joined the saffron party.

They joined the BJP at the party’s headquarters in the national capital in the presence of BJP general secretary Kailash Vijaywargiya and Mukul Roy.
Mukul Roy is seen to be instrumental in engineering the defection of TMC leaders to the BJP. Political watchers believe that Roy is one of the key architects of the party’s best ever show in West Bengal, where TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee is in power since 2011.
BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya had earlier announced that three MLAs and 50-60 councillors will join the BJP today and added that more defections are expected in the future.

This is perhaps the first time that the three members of the Gandhi family are terribly at odds. Rahul has reportedly been urged by mother Sonia and sister Priyanka to remain in office – they are completely against his quitting. Ahmed Patel, his mother’s closest aide, apparently warned him at today’s meeting that the Congress will split if a Gandhi does not helm it.

Rahul Gandhi so far has been inflexible. Sonia, who holds the distinction of the Congress’ longest-serving President, has given a giant hint about her feelings in a letter to her constituency Raebareli. She writes “I know that the coming days are going to be very tough, but I am fully confident that with the power of your support and trust, the Congress will meet every challenge.”

The letter was written on May 24, the day before Gandhi offered to quit. Congress leaders who I spoke to before writing this column say that Gandhi had discussed his determination to quit with his mother and sister. Top leaders present at the Congress Working Committee on Saturday, where Rahul Gandhi made his stand clear, told me that while Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was overwrought and emotional, Sonia Gandhi did not say a word.

Priyanka said her brother could not alone shoulder the blame for the election disaster. After her sibling finished speaking, she accused party leaders of not following his lead in the campaign – by ignoring his cue on the Rafale scandal, for example. “He got no support from all you. He fought alone and made Modi nervous. But, why did none of you back him and expose the government?” she reportedly said.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra (seen here with Jyotiraditya Scindia at the CWC) has reportedly urged her brother Rahul Gandhi to remain in office

Sonia Gandhi has a one-line response to her son’s desire – the Gandhis do not quit public responsibility. She has reportedly said he has a huge legacy to live up to and must not duck the responsibility of ensuring that India’s oldest political party does not splinter.

Rahul Gandhi’s charge that the top leaders of the Congress only focused on perpetuating their family dynasties by putting up their sons for election and focusing on their campaigns while the Gandhi family got the flak as fifth-generation dynasts has become something of a conviction with him.

Two days after the Congress Working Committee ‘unanimously rejected’ party President Rahul Gandhi’s offer to reign, it appears that the leader is unlikely to change his mind about stepping down. Rahul Gandhi met with Congress leaders KC Venugopal and Ahmed Patel on Monday and conveyed that the party would have to find a new President as he would not give into pressure to continue in the top post.

Telegraph’s Sanjay K Jha also reported that Rahul Gandhi had insisted that the new President should be from outside the Congress’ first family, ruling out the idea of his mother Sonia Gandhi and sister Priyanka Vadra taking over. NDTV areported that despite their initial reluctance regarding his resignation, Sonia and Priyanka later agreed with Rahul. They both were of the opinion that Congress needed ‘a change of guard and a total reset’.  

One leader who was present at Saturday’s CWC meeting and quoted by Telegraph stated that Rahul had, however, made it clear that he would not be abandoning the party. “The essence of his argument, however, got lost in the concerns over his resignation. He said I am not going anywhere; I am going to fight harder. If you believe in my leadership, I don’t need any post to prove myself,” said the leader, who added that Rahul had said he would carry on with intense political campaigning while a new party chief looked after the organisation’s affairs.