The Congress’s top decision-making body, the Congress Working Committee or CWC, will meet at 4 pm tomorrow, three days after a huge defeat in state polls, and is likely to advance internal elections scheduled in September amid renewed questions about its leadership, sources said on Saturday.
The Congress faced a wipe-out in state election results declared on Thursday, losing Punjab, one of the last major states under its control, to the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), and failing to put up a strong fight in three other states where it had hoped for a comeback – Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur.
In Uttar Pradesh, where the campaign was led by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, party chief Sonia Gandhi’s daughter and sister to senior leader Rahul Gandhi, 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 revived searing criticism of the Gandhi family besides discordant notes within the party. Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Thursday said the party could not avoid change while his colleague Jaiveer Shergill appealed for reform and warned against “sugar-coating” the loss.
The results are also likely to bolster the case of the group of dissidents within the party dubbed the “G-23” which first wrote an unprecedented letter two years ago to Sonia Gandhi asking for sweeping changes and a “visible and effective leadership”.
However, Gandhi family loyalists have defended the leadership. the party’s top firefighter DK Shivakumar on Friday said the Congress cannot be united without its first family and it was “impossible” for it to survive without them.
“Without the Gandhi family, the Congress party cannot stay united. They are key for the unity of the Congress party… It is impossible for the Congress to survive without the Gandhi family,” the party’s Karnataka unit chief said.