Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Dec 19: The promise for a series of interactive “brain storming sessions” (Chinatn Shibir) to find way forward for strengthening the party was all that the disgruntled senior Congress leaders are believed to have succeeded in extracting from the party leaders at a meeting they held on Saturday with the party interim president Sonia Gandhi.
After the four-hour long meeting Sonia Gandhi had with the rebel leader, senior party leader Pawan Kumar Bansal told the media persons the discussions centered mainly on strengthening the party.
The former Maharashtra chief minister and one of the 23 dissenters Prithviraj Chavan said chintan shibirs (brainstorming session) on the pattern of Pachmarhi and Shimla would soon be held. He also said the meeting was “constructive and more such interactions would be held in future.”
“We discussed the future of the party. It was a constructive meeting in which senior leaders including Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi discussed the current situation of the party and ways to strengthen it,” Chavan said.
It was the first time since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Ms Gandhi was chairing a Congress meeting. She met the group of party leaders who had questioned the leadership of the party and wrote a letter to Gandhi. The meeting was held at her residence at 10 Janpath road. Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi were also present at the meeting.
The crucial meeting was organized to iron out the differences between the party leadership and the dissidents who in their letter had questioned the inaction of the leadership in re-building the party in the face of humiliating defeats it kept suffering in the hands of the BJP in elections after elections.
In August, 23 Congress leaders wrote the letter to Sonia Gandhi calling for “full time and effective leadership.” Among the signatories to the letter were some very senior and prominent leaders who have spent their lifetime in the Congress including Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Kapil Sibal, Manish Tewari, Shashi Tharoor, Vivek Tankha, Mukul Wasnik, Jiitin Prasada, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Rajender Kaur Bhattal, M Veerappa Moily, Prithviraj Chavan, PJ Kurian, Ajay Singh, Renuka Chaudhary, Milind Deora, Raj Babbar, Arvinder Singh Lovely, Kaul Singh Thakur, Akhilesh Prasad Singh, Kuldeep Sharma, Yoganand Shastri, Sandeep Dixit.
About the dissidents’ demand for holding organizational elections including to the party president’s post and the Congress Working Committee (CWC), Bansal said the meeting was informed that the process for holding organisational polls had already been set in motion and the central election authority (CEA) was working on it.
“There is already an election process in motion. There is an agenda before the party. The CEA is working on it,” he said.
He said Sonia Gandhi told the leaders that all of them are a “very big family” and they should strive to strengthen the party. “Congress is one big family. There is no dissidence in the party. All are committed to work unitedly to energise the party,” he said quoting Sonia. He said Rahul Gandhi also spoke on similar lines and claimed that no one in the party, including the dissenters, had any problem with Rahul Gandhi’s leadership.
The party had only on Friday claimed that 99.99 per cent of the Congressmen were in favour of Rahul Gandhi taking back the mantle of the party to throw a challenge to the BJP and the leadership of prime minister Narendra Modi.
In their letter the dissenters had claimed that due to the uncertainty of leadership in the party had demoralised workers.
The Congress communication department head Randeep Surjewala, however, refused to acknowledge it as a meeting between the dissidents and the party leadership. “There is no dissension in the party. This is not a meet of any specific group of leaders. This is not a meet of any dissenters or rebels because we consider each leader, each worker of the Congress party as part of the family. And addressing the issues raised by some of the senior leaders, friends and colleagues, the Congress party had already decided to hold the election for the post of president of the Congress. That process is currently underway,” he had said.