Congress president Sonia Gandhi, her son Rahul Gandhi and daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who fronted the Uttar Pradesh campaign, are expected to resign tomorrow at the meeting of its top decision making body, Congress Working Committee or CWC, taking moral responsibility for the party's poor performance in the recently held assembly elections, sources have told NDTV.
It is to be seen what the CWC members, filled with loyalists, decide. It's not the first time that Ms Gandhi and her son are offering to quit.
They have usually rejected the offer and renewed their support for the Gandhis, but this time round even though 56 members from permanent to special invitees have been called, some CWC members are expected to seek changes, say sources.
The Gandhis also realise that the situation is not the same and as one dissenter said their offer would help the party to get rid of the baggage.
They however add that much would depend on how the situation unfolds with Sonia Gandhi's opening remarks
In 2019, Rahul Gandhi resigned as Congress President after the party's dismal performance. The grand old party has been unable to find a permanent replacement, with Sonia Gandhi acting as interim president since then.
The Congress's poor run at the hustings continued with the party's humiliating 0/5 score in the state election results declared on Thursday. It lost Punjab, one of the last major states under its control, to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), and failed to put up a strong fight in three other states where it had hoped for a comeback - Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur.
AdvertisementIn Uttar Pradesh, where the campaign was led by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the Congress got just 2 seats out of 403, a loss of 5 over the last polls. The party got just 2.4 per cent of the vote.
The defeat has again revived criticism of the Gandhi family and given impetus to calls for a complete overhaul and a leadership change by number of party leaders - a demand that was so far confined to the "G-23" or group of 23 "dissenters" who had written to Sonia Gandhi two years ago.
AdvertisementSenior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, a member of the G-23, on Thursday, had tweeted the party could not avoid change.
Some of the dissidents met at veteran leader Ghulam Nabi Azad's home last evening and reportedly discussed the way forward, expressing dismay at the Congress leadership for not taking any corrective steps to revive the party.
AdvertisementHowever, Gandhi family loyalists have defended the leadership. In an interview with NDTV, the party's key troubleshooter DK Shivakumar on Friday said the Congress cannot be united without its first family and it was "impossible" for it to survive without them.
