Cong rediscovers Kesri amid Bihar election pitch for OBC vote pie

Congress stalwart late Sitaram Kesri got a rare and conspicuous tribute from the Congress leadership on his 25th death anniversary on Friday. This was the first such notable event for him, that too publicised by the AICC, in close to three decades after Kesri became the only Congress president ever to be sacked in 1998 by the Congress Working Committee in order to hand over the party reins to Sonia Gandhi the same day.

The resurrection of the long-camouflaged Kesri memory was done at an AICC event at 24, Akbar Road, the same venue where Kesri was sacked and was once later even roughed up by some party workers. Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi led others in paying floral tributes to him in front of a specially-arranged photo of the late leader, which is widely seen in the party circles as something prompted by the fact that the former de-throned Congress president belonged to the Other Backward Community of Bihar, a social section that Congress has of late started trying to woo. Incidentally, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has often cited the sacking of Kesri as an example of how Congress treated a leader from a backward community.

Ironically, as some Congress leaders privately pointed out, Kesri, a freedom fighter who used to be part of the Congress inner circles and its long-serving AICC treasurer before he became the party president after PV Narasimha Rao quit the post, had been one of the few within the Congress leadership who had assiduously championed the cause of the backward communities, something that had found no favour from the subsequent Congress establishments until last year when Rahul Gandhi ended his "janeudhari" experiment to explore electoral luck with the 'Mandal cause'. After the controversial sacking of Kesri, the Gandhi family-controlled Congress establishment had always kept a safe distance from the Kesri legacy until it rediscovered it on Friday amid the rising election fever in Bihar .