Rahul Gandhi offered to resign post election defeat: Congress

New Delhi: Indian National Congress (INC) President Rahul Gandhi offered to resign from his post during a policy committee meeting. The offer was unanimously rejected by senior members of the party.

Senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad said that Gandhi offered to resign during a Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting to review the party's performance in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

“Rahul said that I, as the chief of the party, should take responsibility and resign (but) all CWC members cutting across age rejected his offer to quit,” Azad told the media emerging from the meeting.

Azad said committee members told Gandhi that the party required his leadership during this challenging time and for the time to come, that “everyone (in Congress) accepts your leadership now and will continue to accept in future also”.

Azad said the committee also asked Gandhi to lead the party in its ideological battle and champion the cause of India’s youth, farmers, poor and deprived and simultaneously requested he overhaul the party.

He said the marathon CWC meeting ended with a resolution by the party’s top leadership authorising Gandhi to restructure the party.

Gandhi, who fronted the opposition campaign against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, however, did not speak to members of the press after the three-hour-long meeting ended.

Top Congress leaders including UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, General Secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, former minister P Chidambaram and Congress’s leader in the outgoing Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge, among others, attended the meeting.

Gandhi took over as the Congress President from his mother Sonia Gandhi in 16 December 2017.

Three senior Congress leaders — Uttar Pradesh unit chief Raj Babbar, HK Patil, who was tasked to oversee the Karnataka Congress campaign and Odisha Congress chief Niranjan Patnaik resigned after the election debacle.

Earlier, in a tweet, Raj Babbar had owned responsibility for the Congress’s disaster in Uttar Pradesh saying “the results are depressing for the Uttar Pradesh Congress (and) I find myself guilty of not discharging my responsibility in a proper manner”.

The Congress won 52 seats this year, a slight improvement on their worst ever performance in the 2014 elections, when they ended up with just 44 seats.

On the other hand, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies won a landslide victory, claiming a super majority in the elections.