Sonia raps Cong leaders, organisers for lack of clarity on policy issues

After the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting, where the Congress interim president Sonia Gandhi did some plain talking pulling up leaders for talking to her through the media, she now turned her ire on party leaders and office-bearers on Tuesday (October 26) for displaying a “lack of clarity and cohesion” on policy issues.

Sonia Gandhi was addressing a meeting of Pradesh Congress Committee chiefs, AICC general secretaries and state in-charges at the party headquarters in New Delhi. Here, she criticised them for showing a lack of clarity and cohesion on policy issues, which was even visible among Congress state-level leaders.

The party needed to fight the “diabolical campaign of BJP and RSS ideologically,” she said, adding the Congress must expose their lies before the people if they were to win this battle.

The AICC issues key statements almost every day on issues facing the nation. But in her experience, she found that they fail to percolate down to the grassroot cadres at the block and district level. “There are policy issues on which I find a lack of clarity and cohesion even amongst our state-level leaders,” said Gandhi.

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After making the announcement in the recently held CWC meeting on October 16 that a training programme for party workers will be held from November, she again reiterated this same point at the Tuesday’s meet saying that training programmes for Congress workers were an “absolute necessity”.

She emphasised the need to train Congress workers to counter the continuous barrage of malicious disinformation campaigns instigated by the BJP/RSS. “And you must train our people to fight it while
upholding and projecting the core Congress ideology,” she pointed out.

Gandhi, who has helmed the grand old party for two decades now, also highlighted the need to “redouble” the fight for those who are the victims of this government’s worst excesses such as the farmers and farm labourers, the youth fighting for jobs and opportunities, small and medium scale businesses, and “our brothers, our sisters with particular focus on the deprived”.

The Congress organisation needed to become more representative of this cross-section of society, she added.

Meanwhile, at the CWC meeting, Gandhi had also urged party leaders not to speak to her through the media. Party leaders needed to be more disciplined, she said. What was more important is to strengthen the organisation and this goal should override personal ambitions. “In this lies both collective and individual success,” she had said.