Sonia Gandhi takes charge to revive Congress; starts meeting party leaders from across the country

Ahead of the 'Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session)' in Rajasthan, Congress president Sonia Gandhi has started a wider consultation process to seek suggestions from leaders and workers on the party's revival across the country.

Gandhi has been meeting second and third rung leaders apart from workers from different states to seek their views on how to make the Congress an election fighting machine once again.

In one such meeting last week, Gandhi met a leader from Bihar and discussed with him various possibilities, including the party's poll prospects in case it decides to go it alone in the next Lok Sabha and state elections.

According to sources, she also asked him about the strengths and weaknesses of the Congress in the state where the grand old party has been out of power for over three decades now following the emergence of socialist leaders such as Lalu Prasad and Nitish Kumar.

Caste equations within the party's Bihar unit also came up for discussion, added the sources.

Interestingly, poll strategist Prashant Kishor in his presentation to the Congress leaders had suggested that the party should snap its decades-old ties with the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) of Lalu Prasad and go it alone in the 2024 Lok Sabha and assembly elections.

Prasad had been a strong ally of the Congress for years now and vociferously backed Sonia Gandhi on her foreign origin issue.

On the same day, she met the party leaders from Jharkhand and Maharashtra, the two states where Congress is part of the ruling coalition.

After the election loss in five states, Sonia Gandhi has been holding regular meetings with the senior leaders and now she has decided to broaden the scope of such internal discussions.

The meetings came in the absence of Rahul Gandhi who returned to India after a few weeks of his foreign trip. A video of Rahul Gandhi at a nightclub in Nepal had gone viral earlier this week with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) alleging that he was partying with a Chinese diplomat, a charge vehemently denied by the Congress, and it later turned out that the individual was actually a Nepalese citizen.

India and China have been at loggerheads over border skirmishes in the Ladakh region since 2020. Rahul Gandhi has been repeatedly questioning the Modi government's weak policy on China.

Post 2014, Sonia Gandhi had taken a backseat with Rahul Gandhi running the party though the actual handover-takeover happened in December 2017. She had to return as interim Congress president in August 2019 after Rahul Gandhi stepped down from the post taking moral responsibility for the party's debacle in the Lok Sabha polls.

A Congress leader said Sonia Gandhi has been meeting all those who had sought appointments with her and holds a free and frank discussion with them on steps needed to rejuvenate the party.

During her earlier tenure, she had revived the practice of holding weekly 'Janta Darbars' but these could last a few weeks only in view of her poor health condition.

She has been forced to step in yet again despite health issues given that the Congress has failed to stem the electoral slide set in since 2014 when it suffered the worst ever drubbing in its electoral history.

After its defeat in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Congress has lost all the state polls (Delhi, Bihar, West Bengal, Kerala, Assam, Puducherry, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, and Manipur). Jharkhand and Tamil Nadu are the exceptions as the Congress contested the elections in these two states as a junior partner to the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) respectively. 
In Maharashtra, the Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) fought the elections together but failed to oust the alliance of the BJP and the Shiv Sena.

However, due to the BJP-Shiv Sena post-poll break-up over the chief ministership issue, luck smiled on the Congress and it became the third partner in the suddenly formed new alliance with the Shiv Sena and the NCP in November 2019.

An elated Congress leader who had met Sonia Gandhi refused to disclose what transpired in their meeting but lauded the initiative as an important step on the part of the leadership to revive its connection with the grassroots workers.

However, he hoped that such consultation should continue and not end abruptly as had happened in the past.