In what will be another setback to the Congress on the eve of the Lok Sabha elections, party veteran leader Kamal Nath and his son and Lok Sabha MP Nakul are likely to quit the party and join the BJP, sources said.
A former Chief Minister and nine-time MP, Kamal Nath, who has worked with three generations of the Gandhis, is set to end his over 50-year association with the Congress at a time when the party is bracing for one of its toughest electoral battles till date.
Nath, 77, will be the tenth former CM of the Congress to leave the party in the last 10 years, joining the ranks of Ashok Chavan – who switched to the BJP earlier this week – Mukul Sangma (Meghalaya), Amarinder Singh (Punjab), Ghulam Nabi Azad (Jammu and Kashmir), Vijay Bahuguna (Uttarakhand), late Ajit Jogi (Chhattisgarh), SM Krishna (Karnataka), Narayan Rane (Maharashtra) and Giridhar Gamang (Odisha) who returned to the party recently.
Amid speculation of his switch to the BJP, Nath reached Delhi from Chhindwara Saturday afternoon. Asked whether he was joining the BJP, he told reporters, “Why are you all getting excited. If there is something like that I will inform you first.”
On whether he was denying it, Nath said, “There is no question of denial (this is not about denying it). This (that he was switching sides) you are saying. You are getting excited. I am not excited, iss taraf ya uss taraf (either way).”
His son Nakul’s move to drop “Congress” from his social media accounts, however, fuelled the speculation.
Nath’s exit would be a huge blow for the Gandhi family given his close personal ties, going back to the days of Indira Gandhi. Nath, a Doon School mate of Sanjay Gandhi, joined the Youth Congress in the 1970s and soon became a key member of Sanjay’s inner circle with the likes of Jagmohan, V C Shukla, Bansi Lal, Om Mehta, Jagdish Tytler and later Akbar Dumpy Ahmad – a coterie that is often blamed for all that went wrong during and after the Emergency.
Nath, who hails from Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh, was rewarded for his friendship with Sanjay with the Chhindwara seat in Madhya Pradesh in the 1980 Lok Sabha polls. Chhindwara and Nagaur in Rajasthan were the only two seats the Congress had won in the 1977 elections post Emergency when the party was wiped out in the Hindi heartland. Since then, Nath won nine Lok Sabha elections from Chhindwara, losing only once.
He was one of Sanjay’s pointsmen who used to drum up political support for the Emergency. It is said that it was he who met Shiv Sena’s Bal Thackeray on Sanjay’s behalf and enlisted his support for the Emergency.
“Sanjay Gandhi used Nath, then his ace lieutenant, to start ‘back channel’ talks with Bal Thackeray. Founder of the Shiv Sena and known as the strongman of Maharashtra, Thackeray had been a strong critic of the Congress. After the Emergency in 1975, Sanjay spoke to him on the phone and sent Nath to Mumbai to meet him… Thackeray agreed to support the Emergency. ‘It’s good for the country,’ he told Nath. Then he added, ‘Once the law and order situation improves, the Emergency can be lifted’,” veteran journalist Neerja Chowdhury has written in her book, ‘How Prime Ministers Decide’.
Nath had been a minister in the P V Narasimha Rao government and later in the UPA I and II governments led by Manmohan Singh. He was one of Rao’s interlocutors who held parleys with L K Advani in the months before the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
Despite being in the Congress for decades, Nath was never really active in Madhya Pradesh politics. He was always a Delhi leader, known for his links with the corporates. He became active in MP politics only in 2018 when he was appointed the state Congress chief. Later that year, Rahul Gandhi anointed him as the CM after the Congress won the Assembly elections, much to the displeasure of the younger party leader Jyotiraditya Scindiawho switched to the BJP in March 2020 after toppling the Nath government.
The exit of Nath, who was never a regional satrap with deep organisational support, is hence going to be more a psychological blow to the Congress, coming as it does right ahead of the Lok Sabha elections, rather than a massive organisational setback. The Congress is already battling a perception gaining ground that the Opposition INDIA bloc is adrift and the Congress is facing desertions.
Nath’s move comes after Chavan and two other Congress leaders from Maharashtra – Baba Siddique and Milind Deora – left the Congress and the party’s two Assam MLAs, including state working president Kamalakhya Dey Purkayastha, extended support to the Himanta Biswa Sarma-led BJP government. These developments have triggered apprehensions in the Congress quarters that the BJP is perhaps succeeding in conveying the perception of a Congress in tatters.
The Congress leadership has been upset with Nath ever since the party’s defeat in the Assembly elections in December last year. The Congress top brass felt Nath, who was very confident of the party’s victory, ran a tepid campaign without involving many leaders.
A meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) held in December after the defeat saw Nath coming in for sharp criticism. Leader after leader spoke about how he functioned unilaterally. The general refrain of the leaders was that he refused to listen to others, even the party central leadership.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had then pointed out that Nath used to get up and leave meetings whenever he disagreed with something that was said. Mukul Wasnik said one of the slogans in MP was “Jai jai Kamal Nath” as if the elections were contested in his name and not that of the Congress.
Nath was soon replaced as the state Congress chief. While the party leadership brought in Ashok Gehlot and Bhupesh Baghel – who were, respectively, the CMs of Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh where the Congress also lost – as members of its National Alliance Committee for seat-sharing talks with the INDIA allies, Nath was left high and dry. Not just Gehlot and Baghel. The party appointed Rajasthan leader Sachin Pilot as an AICC general secretary, and made former Chhattisgarh Deputy CM T S Singh Deo as convenor of the Manifesto Committee for the Lok Sabha polls.
The last nail in the coffin was the AICC leadership’s decision to deny Nath a nomination for the upcoming Rajya Sabha polls. It was said that he sought an Upper House berth for himself when he met Sonia Gandhi earlier this month, although he denied it later. The party eventually gave this nomination from MP to Ashok Singh, a senior party leader close to both Nath and Digvijaya Singh.
Nath’s hold on the Chhindwara seat is formidable. He and his son retained the seat for the Congress even when the Modi wave swept through MP and the entire Hindi belt in 2014 and 2019. What is also interesting is the point that many of the Congress MLAs in MP are loyal to Nath since he, as the then state Congress president, had distributed tickets both in the 2018 and 2023 polls. It is to be seen whether some of the MLAs too would switch sides now.
