Indian national Congress (INC) President Rahul Gandhi today offered resignation from the post shouldering the
responsibility for the party’s miserable election defeat but its highest policy making committee “unanimously” rejected it.
Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said Gndhi offered his resignation as the Congress Working Committee (CWC) held a meeting in New Delhi to review the party’s performance in the just-concluded national elections.
“Rahul said that I, as the chief of the party, should take responsibility and resign (but) all CWC members cutting across age rejected his offer to quit,”,” Azad told the media emerging from the meeting.
He said CWC members told Gandhi that the party required his leadership in this challenging time and the time to come and “everyone ( in Congress) accepts your leadership now and will continue to accept in future also”.
Azad said the meeting also asked Gandhi to lead the party in its ideological battle and champion the cause of India’s youths, farmers, poor and deprived sections and simultaneously requested him to overhaul the party adding that a restructuring plan should be initiated soon to this end.
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He said the marathon CWC meeting ended with a resolution by the party’s top leadership authorizing Gandhi to restructure the party. Gandhi, who had fronted the opposition campaign against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, did not speak to the media after the three-hour-long meeting.
Top Congress leaders including UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi, former minister P Chidambaram and Congress’s leader in the outgoing Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge, among others, attended the meeting. Gandhi took over as the Congress President from his mother Sonia Gandhi in December 16, 2017.
Three senior Congress leaders — Uttar Pradesh unit chief Raj Babbar, HK Patil, who was tasked to oversee the Karnataka Congress campaign and Odisha Congress chief Niranjan Patnaik resigned after the election debacle.
Earlier, in a tweet message on Thursday, Raj Babbar had owned responsibility for the Congress’s disaster in Uttar Pradesh saying “the results are depressing for the Uttar Pradesh Congress (and) I find myself guilty of not discharging my responsibility in a proper manner”.
The Congress won just about 52 seats in the Lok Sabha in this round of national elections, a shade better than its worst performance ever, in the 2014 elections, when it ended up with 44 seats. On the other hand, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP and its allies won a spectacular mandate of over 350 seats in the 543-member Indian parliament.
(BSS)
