NEW DELHI: After the party’s stunning defeat in the Lok Sabha election, the Congress Working Committee will meet on Monday to discuss the poll debacle and corrective measures to revamp the party. The meet is likely to see a flurry of resignations of CWC members taking moral responsibility of the party’s unprecedented defeat.
Party sources, however, ruled out reports that Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi have offered to put in papers.
The meeting of the party’s apex decision-making body has been called to take stock of the political situation in the aftermath of results and fix responsibilities on what went wrong.
After the election results were out on Friday and the party was limited to just 44 seats, the duo in a brief news conference took the responsibility for the party’s debacle in the Lok Sabha election. The party’s vote share this election has shrunk to a little over 19 percent, the lowest ever.
The party is likely to mull over the failure of UPA Government’s policies and decisions, campaign strategy, candidates’ selection and alliance strategy. Senior party leaders are raising questions about the style of Rahul Gandhi but there are doubts if anyone would be bold enough to raise it at the CWC meet.
Senior Congress Leader Kamal Nath said that the resignation of Congress president and vice-president will not “serve any purpose” and everyone need to sit down and “introspect” as to what went wrong and fault lines within the party.
“We have to sit down and talk about how to revive the party and seriously introspect. We thought our decision to carve out a separate state of Telanaga will get us support but it boomerang on us. We were under impression that legislation like food security, land acquisition and many other social security policies will be appreciated by people but it failed. We will talk about how schemes of government failed to have an impact on the people,” said Nath.
Senior leaders have been demanding that the party should seriously mull reasons of poll debacle and not end up with the usual practice of setting up of a committee and then completely forgetting about it. They also demanded that the accountability be clearly fixed and action taken against those responsible.
“Serious introspection is needed but surely not like in the past when suggestions arising out of the introspection were never implemented,” Anil Shastri, who is a special invitee to the CWC said on Twitter. He is believed to have written a letter to the Congress vice-president on things that went wrong and the future course of action to revive the party.