Congress gets Trojan horse feeling in Nagpur

Dr Ravindra Bhoyar (in white cap) with Congress leaders

The Congress's mega plan of registering a back-to-back win over the Bharatiya Janata Party in the legislative council elections from Nagpur local bodies' segment has hit a major roadblock, because its official candidate has gone out of reach, dumped the campaign and backed down on the promise he had made to the new party while leaving the BJP amid high drama late last month.

With just five days to go for the polling, embarrassed Congress leaders have been searching for Dr Ravindra aka Chhotu Bhoyar, a four-time city corporator. The state party leaders rolled out a red carpet for Bhoyar, projecting him as "a giant killer in the making" before the party high command. The party went ballistic while putting a homeopath-turned-politician against the BJP's resourceful former energy minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule. When they failed to locate him, the Congress leaders decided on Saturday to support an independent, Umesh Deshmukh.

The Congress had dared the BJP to beat Bhoyar, who served the BJP for 35 years after being initiated into the RSS at an early age by his father. The Congress proclaimed that it would be repeating the feat that party MLC Abhijit Wanjari had achieved last year by defeating the BJP in the graduates' constituency for the first time in five decades.

But the Congress' game came to naught last week when Bhoyar bluntly told the leaders that he would not be able to shoulder the financial burden of the campaign, which needed a massive investment to win over adequate votes from 556 members of the local self-government in the district. Matters worsened further because, to keep Bhoyar in the fray, the Congress also withdrew dummy nominations, leaving no strong replacement for its "hostile" candidate.

"In fact, we cut the election budget considerably. Some of us volunteered for financial help. As promised, a major contribution was expected from Bhoyar, but he told our leaders in a meeting that he wouldn't be able to keep his promise. Instead, he wanted the party to share the burden. No wonder, tempers ran high. After this meeting, Bhoyar went incommunicado and was nowhere to be seen. He has left us red-faced," a senior Congress leader told mid-day from Nagpur, while the senior leaders including the ministers were huddled in a meeting on Saturday.

The Congress leaders blamed the state unit president Nana Patole for not doing due diligence before admitting Bhoyar into the party fold. "Bhoyar was projected as the exterminator of the BJP and RSS, but he could not even produce a list of 25 BJP corporators, who he claimed were his assured voters," said another Congress leader, wondering whether Bhoyar came to the Congress as a Trojan horse.