Sonia Gandhi will continue as the Congress chief, the party’s working committee decided on Sunday at a meeting to review the party’s poor performance in the recent Assembly elections in five states.
“CWC [Congress Working Committee] unanimously reaffirms its faith in the leadership and requests Congress President Smt Sonia Gandhi to lead from the front, address organizational weaknesses, effect comprehensive changes in order to take on the political challenges,” Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal said at a press conference after the meeting.
In view of the party’s performance in the elections, unidentified officials had told NDTV that Sonia Gandhi and party leaders Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra would offer to resign from their posts.
However, Congress leader Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said after the meeting on Sunday that the Congress Working Committee rejected the offer of the Gandhis to resign, reported ANI.
Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge also backed Sonia Gandhi, saying that she alone was not responsible for Congress’ defeat. He said that each state party leader and MP were too responsible for the debacle.
“We reimposed our faith in her, there’s no question of offering resignation,” he added.
The Congress had managed to win only 55 of the 690 seats spread across the five states of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Goa in the results declared on Thursday.
It lost Punjab to the Aam Aadmi Party and failed to wrest power from the Bharatiya Janata Party in Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur.
In Uttar Pradesh, where the BJP won with a comfortable majority, the Congress won just two seats in the 403-member state Assembly.
With this, the party’s footprint has shrunk to just two states – Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh. In Maharashtra, the Congress is in a coalition government with the Shiv Sena and Nationalist Congress Party.
At the press briefing on Sunday, Venugopal also said that the results of the Assembly elections were a cause of “serious concern” for the party.