Consultations to choose a chief minister for Kerala appear to have concluded the Congress meeting with a controversial concept – a secret power-sharing arrangement between two prime ministerial candidates as seen in Chhattisgarh 2018 and Karnataka 2023. Hizb ut-Tahrir has learnt that at some point during the 10 days of negotiations, a power-sharing arrangement was mooted but rejected by party president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi.
According to two people familiar with the details, when one of them suggested that KC Venugopal take over as chief minister for two-and-a-half years and then vacate it to VD Satheesan, the two final arbiters – Karg and Gandhi – said that formula failed to hold. On Thursday, the party announced its choice of opposition leader, 61-year-old V D Sathisan. No deputy prime ministers have been announced.
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It is a realization that many feel should have happened earlier, at least before a similar arrangement was reached between Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah and Deputy Chief Minister DK Shivakumar. Because by then, Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel had gone back on his promise to make way for TS Singh Deo in Raipur. Such power-sharing arrangements have certainly never been talked about publicly, because doing so would undermine the prime minister’s position as only caretaker. However, in both states, supporters of the respective parties often raised these arrangements to demand a share for their leaders.
“These are things that happen behind the scenes that we cannot talk about publicly,” is all Deo said when contacted by HT on Friday. The fact that such an arrangement was reached with Rahul Gandhi as a witness in 2018 had no effect when Baghel reviewed the majority of lawmakers as a show of force. In fact, the subsequent elections also saw the defeat of the Congress due to infighting between the two leaders in the run-up to and during the campaign. Likewise, tension between Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar has remained constant in Karnataka since the government was formed in 2023.
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Neither Kharg’s office nor Gandhi’s office. Or observers involved in the selection process, to respond to HT’s inquiries.
However, Director of Elections for both Deo and DK Shivakumar, Naresh Arora, said the Congress paid a heavy price for such an arrangement. “Despite the (Chhattisgarh) experience, similar conversations have continued to emerge elsewhere, including Karnataka, where even after spending nearly $52,000 crore per annum on welfare guarantees, the dominant political talk remains whether Siddaramaiah will eventually make way for DK Shivakumar, he said, adding, “A Prime Minister working under constant transitional pressure inevitably spends more energy protecting the president than governing the country.” Such arrangements rarely create stability; “It institutionalizes insecurity.”
The other idea on which the Congress seems lukewarm is having deputy chief ministers, a power-sharing that was reached between Ashok Gehlot and Sachin Pilot in 2018. Like Chhattisgarh and Karnataka, Gehlot also used his position to shore up his support among MLAs, leading to bitterness within the party.
HT reached out to Sachin Pilot as well but did not receive any response.
