With senior party worker Brijesh Kalappa leaving to join the Aam Aadmi Party, the Congress party in Karnataka has suffered yet another defeat. In 1997, Mr. Kalappa, a Supreme Court lawyer, joined the grand old party. In an emotional letter to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, he stated that he had lost his motivation to continue fighting for the party’s interests because he was not given his due. He told NDTV that he is joining Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP.
“I have been representing the party on Hindi, English, and Kannada networks since the UPA years in 2013 for almost a decade and have clocked 6497 discussions,” he added, highlighting his service to the party. Furthermore, the party has consistently assigned me political responsibilities, which I have completed to my pleasure.”
He insisted that he never felt drained of energy and enthusiasm when representing the party, even after the “debacles” of 2014 and 2019, but that he has recently been “lacking in emotion,” and that his own performance has been “listless and perfunctory.”
Mr Kalappa’s 25-year affiliation with the party came to an end shortly after Mukhyamantri Chandru, a prominent Kannada actor and former MLC, resigned from the Congress’ primary membership after being rejected a candidacy to the Legislative Council.
On May 27, Mr. Kalappa criticized BJP leader KS Eshwarappa’s remark on bringing back temples. Mr. Eshwarappa had declared that “all 36,000 temples will be brought back to the Hindus” during the uproar over the Gyanvapi and Shahi Eidgah mosques in Uttar Pradesh.
This comes at a time when Congress is already dealing with internal divisions over its Rajya Sabha list. Ashish Deshmukh, a Maharashtra Congress official, resigned as General Secretary of the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee yesterday, citing the “imposition” of an outsider in the state.
Many issues have also been raised concerning the selection of candidates for the upper house of parliament by sources close to the G-23, or Group of 23 “dissenters” in the Congress. In Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh, the two states where it is in power, the party has chosen “outsiders” as well.
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