Senior Congress leader and a member of the Group of 23 bloc Ghulam Nabi Azad has told News18 that party president Sonia Gandhi has been receptive to the suggestions made by the dissenting lobby following drubbing in Assembly election 2022 that saw the Congress lose power in Punjab.
Azad had met the interim Congress president on Friday at her 10 Janpath residence in the national capital. Speaking to News18, he said there is no dispute on the leadership of Sonia Gandhi. “Sonia Gandhi is receptive to our suggestions regarding change and strength in the organization and she also wants that the organization should be strong,” he said.
After the meeting with Sonia, Azad had told reporters that he gave her suggestions to strengthen the party and held a discussion on how to take on rivals “unitedly” in the next tranche of Assembly polls.
The Group of 23 has pitched for an “inclusive and collective leadership” in the Congress. Kapil Sibal, another G-23 leader, had said recently that the Gandhis should step aside and pave the way for someone else to take over the reins of the party.
Asked about Sibal’s call for the leadership change, Azad said, “There is no question of leadership (change). When Mrs Gandhi had offered (to quit) at the CWC, then all of us asked her to continue. There will be a discussion on that when the elections take place in the party.”
Party workers will decide at that time who will be the president, Azad said. “The post of the party president is not vacant today. In the working committee, when she had offered to quit, all of us, be it from any group or thinking, said Mrs Gandhi you continue, we have no problems, but there are some suggestions we had given to strengthen the organisation,” Azad added.
“Nobody has said Mrs Gandhi should just quit, let me tell you very clearly that we had decided in the working committee,” he said.
The members of G-23 have held a flurry of meetings over measures to revamp the party. After the group pitched for an “inclusive and collective leadership” in the Congress, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, one of its members, had met Rahul Gandhi and the two leaders were learnt to have discussed a revamp of the party organisation, a key demand of the dissenters.
The meetings held by Rahul with Hooda and Sonia with Azad are seen as an attempt by the Gandhi family to reach out to the G-23, which had shown signs of increasing aggression on the leadership issue after Congress’ abject loss in the Assembly elections in five states.
The G-23 has been persistently seeking a restructuring of the organisation since it first wrote to Sonia Gandhi in 2020 about it after a string of electoral losses.
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