As Kanhaiya Kumar is set to join the Congress, CPI Bihar state secretary Ram Naresh Pandey has claimed that the former JNU Students Union president took out the AC installed by him in the CPI’s state office in Patna few days ago, reported news agency ANI.
“I gave my consent because he had installed it at his own cost,” Pandey was quoted by ANI as saying. Pandey said that he hopes that Kumar will take back his decision to join the Congress.
He also said that when Kumar participated in the National Executive Council meeting of CPI on September 4 and 5 in the national capital, he did show any intent of leaving the party or expressed his demand of a bigger post in the party.
The CPI leader, along with Gujarat MLA Jignesh Mevani, is set to join the Congress on Tuesday. Posters welcoming Kumar into the Congress have been put up outside the party office in Delhi ahead of his proposed joining.
There is a growing uneasiness between Kumar and his party amid media reports of him joining the Congress. An internal split within the CPI over promoting Kumar at the national level may have triggered his imminent exit from the party.
Congress, which is facing an existential crisis in Bihar, sees Kumar’s entry as a boost in the NDA-ruled state as the Grand Old Party seeks revival in the 2025 Bihar assembly polls. Also, Kumar’s entry will come amid the suffering desertion by many young leaders in the past two years, including Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sushmita Dev, Jitin Prasada and Priyanka Chaturvedi.
While Kumar is considered a crowd-puller, some leaders in the Congress believe that Kumar could be a baggage for the party given his controversial past. Even in the CPI, he had faced a censure – a mild disciplinary action – earlier this year for a ruckus at the party’s Patna office in December last year.
Kumar unsuccessfully contested the Begusarai Lok Sabha election as a CPI candidate and lost to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stalwart and Union minister Giriraj Singh in 2019.