CWC meet today, Sonia in favour of a new leader

CONGRESS Keen to end interim presidency, indicates party chief after seniors seek overhaul

NEW DELHI: Congress president Sonia Gandhi looks set to announce her decision to step down at Monday’s meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party’s highest decision-making body, after 103 Congress leaders wrote a letter to her this month, seeking a complete rehaul of the organisation.

The letter, which was signed by former chief ministers and members of Parliament, alleged “drift” and “uncertainty” over the leadership of the 134-year-old party. The letter was signed by, among others, Kapil Sibal, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Shashi Tharoor, Bhupinder Hooda, Milind Deora, Manish Tewari and PJ Kurien, and delivered to her residence – 10, Janpath – on Independence Day.

Hindustan Times has learnt that Gandhi responded to the letter a few days later with a handwritten note to one of the signatories.

According to two senior Congress leaders that HT spoke with, the 73-year-old Gandhi said Congress leaders should get together and find a new chief because she does not want to carry the responsibility of leading the party any longer.

Sonia Gandhi became interim president of the Congress after Rahul Gandhi quit as the party chief in May 2019, owning responsibility for the Congress’s rout in last year’s general elections, in which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led the National Democratic Alliance to power for the second straight term.

Expressing her sense of hurt at being targeted by party leaders who made the complaint against the Congress leadership public, Gandhi wrote in the note that she was not interested in leading the party and had accepted the post of interim chief after much persuasion only on condition that the party will find a replacement for her soon, according to the two senior leaders cited above, who requested anonymity.

Congress leaders made desperate pleas to her after Rahul Gandhi rejected their calls to withdraw the resignation that he offered on May 25, 2019.

For the record, party spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said: “Reports of Sonia Gandhi resigning from her post of Congress president are false.” The two leaders that HT spoke to confirmed that Gandhi was inclined to resign at the CWC meeting, called to discuss the leadership issue. “If she has to resign, she may do so when she meets with the leadership tomorrow,” said one of the two leaders, requesting anonymity.

Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan said in Gwalior: “The Congress is bound to sink; no power in the

world can save it.”

While Surjewala and other party leaders denied that she had already resigned, Monday’s CWC meeting is set to be a stormy one with a confrontation likely between those who are unhappy with the current style of functioning of the leadership (Sibal, Azad) and those that are part of the current power structure – KC Venugopal, Randeep Surjewala and Rajeev Satav, among others.

In a column published in Hindustan Times on August 4, Sibal wrote about the importance of value of organisations.