JAIPUR/NEW DELHI, July 14:
The Congress today cracked down on Sachin Pilot, stripping the dissident leader of the posts of Rajasthan’s Deputy Chief Minister and the party’s state unit president and sacking two loyalists from the state Cabinet.
Though the party seems to have the numbers for now to hang on to power in Rajasthan, the development deepens the crisis in the Congress which has lost two major States – Karnataka and Madhya Pradesh – over the past year.
Ministers Vishvendra Singh and Ramesh Meena were also removed from the Cabinet after a meeting of the Congress Legislature Party, its second in the last two days.
The meeting was billed as a “second chance” for Pilot, who had turned down appeals from the party’s top leadership – including Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi — to return to the fold.
Pilot has been upset since the Congress picked Ashok Gehlot as the Chief Minister after the 2018 assembly polls, while his own supporters insisted that he deserved credit for the party’s victory as its state unit president.
His next move is not immediately clear. During the run-up to Tuesday’s CLP meeting, his supporters insisted that he had no plans to join the Bharatiya Janata Party. They said their aim was a leadership change in Rajasthan.
“Truth can be rattled, not defeated,” Pilot tweeted in Hindi soon after he was sacked. (PTI)
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