D K Shivakumar plans ‘ghar wapsi’ to bring leaders back to Congress

The D K Shivakumar-led Congress has planned a political ‘ghar wapsi’ to bring back leaders who quit the party and also rope in those from other parties.

Shivakumar, the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president, has constituted a 12-member committee headed by former minister Allum Veerabhadrappa to liaise to anchor this effort to bring back people into the party fold.

This move comes more than a year after over a dozen Congress MLAs defected and joined the BJP, leading to the collapse of the Congress-JD(S) coalition government. Also, several influential leaders quit the party ahead of the Lok Sabha elections last year.

The constitution of this committee also coincides with disgruntlement brewing within the ruling BJP.

“Many people who left the party and others have applied (to join Congress). Many have met me also. I felt it wouldn't be right for me to make a decision. So, this committee has been constituted,” Shivakumar said. “They will process all applications and send it to the KPCC.”

According to Shivakumar, any person wanting to join the Congress should accept the party’s leadership and its ideology. “Importantly, they should be first accepted by the cadre. If there's no acceptance from the cadre, then what's the point?” he said.

In the past, onboarding some leaders from other parties backfired, Shivakumar admitted. “Someone we take at the state-level shouldn’t misfire at the block-level. We’ve seen this happen before,” he said.

Shivakumar, who was appointed as the state party chief in March, has started an ambitious exercise to make the Congress a cadre-based party, an attempt that has not been successful in the past. “The formation of this committee is more like structural programming,” he said.

The 12-member committee headed by Veerabhadrappa has former MLAs B A Hasanabba, Ajaykumar Sarnaik, Abhaychandra Jain, Satish Sail, Prafulla Madhukar, former MPs R Dhruvanarayan and BN Chandrappa, MLA V Muniyappa, former mayor Sampath Raj, Mahila Congress leader Kripa Alva and former KPCC general secretary V Y Ghorpade.