Letter By 23 Congress Leaders Was 'Not Against Sonia But Rahul’s Episodic Leadership'

The concerns flagged by 23 Congress leaders in a letter to the party’s interim chief Sonia Gandhi “were not an act of rebellion” against her but a “means to convey the unease within large sections of the party against Rahul Gandhi’s episodic leadership and back-seat driving” of the organisation, several signatories of the letter have told Outlook.

The leaders, requesting anonymity due to the “ongoing smear campaign against each of them”, said that though they would welcome Rahul back at the party’s helm, the former and possibly future party chief “must recognise that not everyone demanding change in the workings of the Congress is an enemy”.

The decision to send the letter to Sonia was “taken after due consideration”, a party MP and signatory to the letter told Outlook. He added that the group demanding reforms initially wanted to raise the issues “face to face with Sonia” but could not meet the interim chief due to her ailing health and concerns related to coronavirus. Asked why the most senior leaders in the group, instead of all 23 signatories, did not seek an appointment with her to discuss the issues, the leader explained that “while all of us have laid out a broad outline of how we wish for the party to move forward, there were differences on the nuances which could have been discussed threadbare if everyone was allowed to independently place his or her views”.

The decision to send the letter was finally taken after an audience with Sonia seemed unlikely, “particularly given the current Covid situation and steadily rising cases and Sonia had only recently (in early August) been hospitalised”. The letter was sent to Sonia, on August 7, by Ghulam Nabi Azad after he was informed in the interim party chief’s office that she was back home from the hospital. Azad spoke to Sonia once over the following week to “enquire about her health and check if she had read the letter”. On August 17, since the group had not received any reply from Sonia, another reminder was sent to Sonia by Azad. By this time, sources say, several signatories had heard from some senior party leaders who weren’t among those who wrote the letter that an extended CWC meet was being convened and that the high command was “livid about the revolt”. Azad is learnt to have requested Sonia, over phone, to “meet the signatories before the CWC was called” but an appointment wasn’t given.

Another signatory to the letter said the exercise of thrashing out a revival plan by the letter-writers had begun sometime in late-February “after seeing that the Congress Working Committee’s resolution of last year (August 10, when Sonia was made the interim chief after Rahul’s resignation) for organisational revamp had not been put into action”. The signatory said there were initially “two groups of people working independently of each other and unaware of their respective exercise to discuss the way forward for the party”. It was days before Lockdown 1.0 was imposed on March 24 that some leaders of these two groups realised, in the course of a casual conversation, that “there was a common string of thought” following which it was decided that instead of working as separate groups raising the same issues they must all “work together to define a revival blueprint”.

A former chief minister who is part of this “pro-reform group” tells Outlook that a major concern among all the leaders was “the manner in which Rahul had been operating since his resignation a year ago and the disquiet this was creating within the Congress.” The former CM said, “We realise that Rahul’s interventions in the recent months have great merit – whatever he has said on coronavirus, the lockdown, fuel prices or China has been extremely prescient – but the problem is that he acts in isolation, making his distrust of party leaders – both old and young – very obvious”.

The signatories say the fact that the letter was signed by Milind Deora and Jitin Prasada is an indicator of how even those considered part of Rahul’s inner circle until recently have been feeling restless. Deora and Prasad were considered Rahul’s men in the party; the former was a key member of Rahul’s plan for reaching out to overseas Indian citizens and helped organize the former party chief’s interactions at foreign universities.

A senior party functionary who signed the letter said that when the CWC asked Sonia to step in as interim chief last year, “the impression all of us got was that this is a temporary arrangement to prevent the party from completely unravelling because of a leadership vacuum.” The functionary said that the past year saw no cogent roadmap being developed to address issues that have wrecked the party “but Rahul, who claims he is now an ordinary Congress worker and wants a non-Gandhi chief, has been pushing for his appointees in every state and to the Rajya Sabha while people who put in decades to build the party, have the organisational, administrative and electoral experience, were left to fend for themselves.”

Sonia’s indifferent health, says another signatory, has been a cause of concern for everyone in the party and “sooner or later there will have to be a transition of power but if Rahul has to take over, he needs to learn the art of consensus building that his mother mastered in the nearly 20 years that she steered the party… currently, Rahul’s working style has been of alienating party loyalists and promoting greenhorns based on his personal likes and dislikes”. A party MP who also signed the letter says, “For now, we are satisfied that Sonia will stay on as interim chief till an AICC session is convened to elect a full-time president” but adds that “there have been strong indications within the party of Rahul’s imminent return and given our experience of working under him and being forced to prove our loyalty again and again, the nervousness some of us feel is not unfounded.”

Several signatories insist that the letter was not leaked by them but by “someone from the other side to malign all of us as some group plotting a coup”. They demand that the party “must investigate who leaked the letter a day ahead of the CWC meet and why”. A leader said, “it was never about Sonia… each one of us has worked very closely with her over the years”.

The signatories told Outlook that party veteran Ghulam Nabi Azad and Anand Sharma’s outburst at the CWC meet against those painting them as traitors for signing the letter was “the biggest self-goal those demanding status-quo in the party could have scored”. One of the letter writers said, “90 per cent of the signatories are people who have served the party for decades, been handpicked by Sonia for key assignments, served as chief ministers, Union ministers… we have been hardcore Congressmen all our lives and are now at the fag end of our careers; even those abusing us today cannot deny this.”

The signatories believe that there is “no doubt” that Rahul will return as party president whenever the AICC session is convened and concede that “it is imperative for the unity of the Congress to have a Nehru-Gandhi chief”. However, they add that Rahul will need to “mend his way and Sonia must use this extended period of her interim stint to reason with her son”. A signatory says, “Sonia’s biggest asset was her ability to carry everyone along and her eagerness to give everyone a patient hearing… Rahul lacks both and will need to develop these skills if he wants to make a success of his second term.” He adds, “Rahul’s constant complaint is that he is fighting a lonely battle… fact is, we want to stand behind him in taking on the BJP but he has made it overtly clear to us that he doesn’t trust us despite our continuing commitment to the party and the fact that most people who have deserted the Congress in the past year were his confidantes.”

The signatories are looking forward to the implementation of the assurance they got at the CWC of a committee being constituted to assist Sonia in running the party till the AICC session is convened. They hope that “such an arrangement to boost collective leadership as sought in our letter continues with the full-term party chief too”. Some of the signatories are also hopeful that the committee may even include one of them, given Sonia’s working style but are also aware that “Rahul may not want this to happen”.

The storm that the letter created, one of the signatories says, “has abated for now… we are happy with Sonia continuing” but he adds, “it may revive with greater force if all reforms suggested by us are dismissed with contempt”. The leader adds, “besides the 23 of us who signed the letter, there were 280 other party leaders from across the country who endorsed it but we have kept their names under wraps… if things continue as they are, many of these people may be forced to speak out in the coming months”.