New Delhi, March 13, 2020-
Exactly 365 days ago, he dumped his party to join the Bharatiya Janata Party. Known to be among the very few who had access to 10, Janpath — Congress chief Sonia Gandhi’s residence, in March last year, Tom Vadakkan caught everyone including his own party unaware when he walked up to the BJP podium to say, “I gave prime of my life to the Congress. But dynastic politics is now at its zenith in the party… There’s no place in it for self-respecting people.”
On his first year anniversary in the BJP, Vadakkan dropped another bomb on the Gandhis, saying the party will be taken over by the Vadras.
“It is a family entreprise. Now it will be probably the Vadras taking over. The Vadra family will take over, their children will take over (the Congress). That’s how it is,” Vadakkan alleged, with a straight face.
When asked to reconfirm what he just said, Vadakkan gave a one word reply, “Absolutely”.
Further emphasising his point, calling the Congress a ‘family entreprise’, Vadakkan added that “Priyanka and Priyanka’s Children…I mean that’s how hard you work. How many years you’ve put.. That’s not in question. How much efforts you’ve made, not…These are things that don’t matter. what matters is, do you belong to the family?”
Wearing a Modi Kurta, Vadakkan was flipping news channel which beamed stories of Jyotiraditya Scindia filing nomination, with Shivraj Singh Chauhan by his side. Passingly he remarked, “I was part of the team that welcomed him to Congress. And here I was at the BJP office when he joined on Wednesday.”
“The month of March is usually very heavy on the Congress,” said he. Both Vadakkan and Scindia left Congress in March. He quoted Shakespeare’s Julias Caesar where a soothsayer warns Caesar to “Beware the ides of March.” “They (Congress) too need to beware,” he told.
Will Sachin Pilot too follow suit? Vadakkan evades answering. However, he adds, as long as the party continues to ignore the younger generation at the cost of choosing family loyals, “its just a matter of time” before more young turks of Congress leave the party.
“There’s a whole lot of disillusioned young men, standing and waiting for an opportunity to move out,” the former Gandhi family loyalist warns.
In 2019, just before India went to elections, Vadakkan cited his disenchantment with the party over questioning the government after the horrific Pulwama attack that killed 43.
On his first anniversary in the BJP, couple of days after Jyotiraditya Scindia joined it citing Congress “living in denial”, Vadakkan too claimed the grand old party is “putting up a show” while its “ideology has worn off”. “Only the family matters,” he concluded. (Agency)
