Senior Congress leader and a member of G-23 group, Ghulam Nabi Azad, on Friday met the grand old party’s interim president Sonia Gandhi amid a rift going on within the party. Some other members of the G-23 group are also expected to meet the top brass of the party this evening. This comes a day after members of the dissenting group held a flurry of meetings over measures to revamp the party. A crucial Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting was also held on March 14 in which the party’s poor performance in the recently concluded assembly polls was discussed.
After meeting Gandhi, Azad said that the upcoming assembly polls were discussed in the meeting. “The meeting with Congress president was good. We keep meeting the Congress chief and she meets leaders regularly. A working committee meeting happened recently and suggestions were asked to strengthen the Congress party. I also had given some suggestions. So I have repeated those suggestions. Overall the discussion was on upcoming assembly polls. Suggestions to improve the party can’t be given publicly. There is no vacancy for a party president now. She offered her resignation but we rejected it. It was decided that she should continue,” he said.
Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, and Mukul Wasnik were the only three from the Group of 23 leaders, who have repeatedly pressed for organizational overhaul, present at the meeting of the CWC, which has a large number of Gandhi family loyalists.
A day after the Group of 23 pitched for an “inclusive and collective leadership” in the Congress, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, one of its members, met Rahul Gandhi and the two leaders were learnt to have discussed a revamp of the party organization, a key demand of the dissenters.
The meeting is being seen as an attempt by the Gandhi family to reach out to the G-23, which has shown signs of increasing aggression on the leadership issue after Congress’s abject loss in the assembly elections in five states.
During the meeting that lasted around an hour and half, they deliberated on the party’s defeat in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Manipur and Goa, sources said. Gandhi, a former Congress president, had called Hooda for a discussion on the political situation in Haryana. However, the discussion spilled over to the party’s abysmal performance in the elections in the five states.
Deputy Leader of the Congress in Rajya Sabha and another G-23 leader Anand Sharma also joined Hooda at Azad’s residence where they discussed the outcome of his meeting with Rahul Gandhi. Later in the evening, Sibal also met Azad at the latter’s residence. Hooda, according to sources, told Gandhi that G-23 leaders were not hankering for any position but only seeking to strengthen the party.
Amid calls by a section of Gandhi family loyalists for action against Kapil Sibal, who recently said the Gandhis should step aside and pave the way for someone else to take over the reins of the party, Hooda is learnt to have conveyed to Rahul Gandhi that such a step will be unacceptable to the grouping as the dissident leader had only spoken about strengthening the Congress.
T S Singh Deo, a minister in Chhattisgarh, was the latest Congress leader to demand action against Sibal on Thursday for speaking against the party leadership.
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