New Delhi: The Congress will hold its three-day Chintan Shivir from May 14-16 in Rajasthan. Following an announcement by party chief Sonia Gandhi recently, the party leaders had discussed various options for the big event before finalizing Congress-ruled State. The party has two choices - Udaipur and Jaipur, for the event venue.
“Leaders from across the country will gather at the Chintan Shivir…it is going to be an important meeting,” a senior AICC functionary said on condition of anonymity as he did not want to be identified. The senior congress leader said it would let the Congress top brass take stock of the political situation across the country.
It will also prepare a plan of action for the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, when the grand old party hopes to take on the BJP, which rules at the Centre and in 18 states. The leadership issue, which has been discussed in the Congress since 2019, will also be discussed at the meet, another source privy to the development said.
In 2019, then party chief Rahul Gandhi owned up responsibility for the poll defeat and resigned from the top party post. Later, Sonia Gandhi was brought back as an interim chief till a full-time party president was elected. However, the elections for the new party chief could not be held after 2019.
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It added to the unease among a section of senior leaders, who came to be known as the G23 and wrote a letter to Sonia demanding internal elections for all party posts. This, the G23 argued, was needed to restrengthen the party across the country. Besides ways to revive the Congress, future alliances are also likely to be discussed at the Chintan Shivir, the sources said.
The party is concerned as it lost power to the BJP in the 2014 and 2019 national elections and also suffered a series of poll losses in several states over the past eight years. Sonia Gandhi had said that the grand old party needed to hold a mega brainstorming session to discuss and prepare a future roadmap for the Congress, which is in power only in two states Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
The Congress shares power in Maharashtra, where it is part of the Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress alliance, in Jharkhand where it is part of the JMM-Congress alliance and in Tamil Nadu, where it shares power with the DMK. In the five assembly polls in 2021, the Congress had done well only in Tamil Nadu, where the DMK-Congress alliance defeated the AIADMK-BJP combine.
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In the other four states that had assembly polls, the Congress-led alliance could not defeat the BJP in Assam, the Congress-led UDF could not defeat the CPI-M-led LDF in Kerala, the Congress-CPI-M alliance was wiped out in West Bengal and the grand old party lost in Union Territory Puducherry.
In 2022, the Congress lost all the five assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Punjab, Goa and Manipur. “We have been pained and shocked at the results,” Sonia recently told a meeting of Congress parliamentarians where she urged them to brace for the future challenges.
