After the party's debacle in the just-concluded assembly polls, senior Congress leader P Chidambaram on Thursday said that the Gandhis could not be held responsible for the party's recent election defeats.
"The Gandhis offered to step down, but it was not accepted by the CWC. So, what is our option now? We need to speed up the process to elect a new Congress president. But the earliest that that can happen is August. But what do we do between now and August? Till then we, including me, believe that Mrs Gandhi is leading the charge," Chidambaram told NDTV.
Amid differences in the party on the issue of leadership, P Chidambaram urged the G-23 leaders not to split the party.
"I hope there will not be a split. My appeal to them is not to split the party. My appeal to them would be to go back to their constituencies and build the party. Everyone should go back and rebuild party units," Chidambaram told NDTV.
Chidambaram's remarks came after the G-23 had made a strong pitch for "collective leadership" at its meeting on Wednesday.
The G-23 has been persistently seeking a restructuring of the organisation since it first wrote to Sonia Gandhi in 2020 about it after of a string of electoral losses and the party's diminishing clout.
The grouping had, in a statement on Wednesday, said the "only way forward for the Congress was to adopt a model of inclusive and collective leadership and decision making at all levels." They insisted they want to strengthen the Congress and "not undermine it in any way." Sources in the G-23 said the leaders discussed some "concrete proposals", the details of which were not immediately known, to strengthen the Congress. These proposals may be considered when Ghulam Nabi Azad, once a Gandhi family loyalist, meets the Congress president.
(With inputs from Agencies)
