Ishtiyaq Ahmad
Early Times Report
Srinagar, Nov 29: Ugly scenes were witnessed at Congress headquarters in Srinagar on Thursday during a party meeting as some of the second rung leaders entered into heated arguments with the party president G A Mir, sources told Early Times.
They said MLA Sopore Haji Abdul Rasheed had an argument with Mir over the functioning of the party and indiscipline within the ranks of Congress. "As Rasheed was shouting at Mir, Party's Anantnag District President, Ghulam Mohi-ud-Din confronted Rasheed. This led to a confrontation between Rasheed and Mohi-ud-Din and they almost came up to exchanging blows, but the intervention of the other leaders present there prevented them from entering into a scuffle," sources revealed.
The ugly scenes were witnessed in presence of two All India Congress Committee (AICC) secretaries, Shakeel Ahmad and Sudhir Sharma, who were also present in the meeting, they said.
Although the bickering within the Congress is no secret but today's incident has clearly shown that Mir is losing his grip over the party affairs. A senior party leader on the condition of anonymity said that the resentment against Mir is brewing from the last some months as some senior state leaders want to overthrow him and are building pressure on party high command for replacing him.
"Senior leaders and legislators including MLA Rasheed, MLA Bandipora, Usman Majeed, MLA Devsar Mohammad Amin Bhat and MLC G N Monga from Kashmir and lot of leaders from Jammu want Mir's ouster. Even former minister and senior Congress leader Sham Lal Sharma in May had quit from the post of senior Vice President citing Mir's inefficiency to handle the party," said a Congress leader.
"From the position of political inevitability to insignificance, Congress is relegating to the periphery of political canvas in Jammu and Kashmir thick and fast due to the incompetence of the state leadership and especially the incumbent President. If the central leadership fails to address the factionalism within its state unit and thinks out of the box to play the role of an imaginative and relevant opposition, Congress may soon lose its traditional political space to ruling BJP forever," the leader warned. |
