Shankersinh Vaghela keeps Congress guessing on quit plans

GANDHINAGAR: Will he? Will he not? The Gujarat Congress is getting used to the riddle every election season. With Shankersinh Vaghela, the opposition leader, making his unhappiness with the Congress high command known, speculation is gaining ground that his supporters may engineer a split in the party ahead of the assembly election.

While Vaghela stated that he was not in the race to become the chief minister, it hasn’t helped quell the rumours. In 1995, Vaghela, then in the BJP, had withdrawn from the CM race when the saffron party had won Gujarat for the first time. Within a year, he engineered a split in the BJP and occupied the CM’s chair with the support of the Congress.

He joined the Congress later, but has never been able to garner complete trust within the party.

Vaghela, meanwhile, has never really given up his courteous relations with his former colleagues in the saffron fold, and hosted BJP president Amit Shah in his office chamber in the secretariat recently.

Sources close to Vaghela said he was miffed with the treatment meted out to him recently in a meeting chaired by Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi.

While Congress leaders denied that he was treated shabbily, Vaghela’s actions — he unfollowed Gandhi and several Congress leaders on Twitter — bolstered the notion that all is not well in the party.

While murmurs of an impending split are still gaining momentum at the grassroots level, many in the BJP joke that Vaghela was in fact helping the saffron party by remaining in the Congress.