Rahul Gandhi leaves Congress chief selection to party

Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said not him, but his party will decide his successor, asserting his stand to step down as the party chief following the debacle in the recently concluded Lok Sabha elections.

He did not want to interfere with the selection process, which he has left it to the Congress Working Committee, the party’s highest decision-making body, he told news channel NDTV.

Gandhi had resigned soon after the poll results gave BJP a massive victory a month back, leaving Congress with the just 52 seats in the 543-member house. Gandhi also lost from the Congress family bastion of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh to BJP’s Smriti Irani. He, however, managed to win from Kerala’s Wayanad.

Gandhi had blamed some seniors in the party for the loss, saying they focussed too much on their sons rather than the party’s benefit.

The party has also been facing infighting in many parts of the country, witnessing a young-vs-old fight.

However, the CWC rejected his resignation, saying that only the Gandhi family could hold the party together. Various party leaders have exhorted Gandhi to continue as the chief.

Left in the lurch in the face of Gandhi’s stand, the party picked up West Bengal MP Adhir Ranjan Choudhary as its leader in the Lok Sabha.

In the party, the other prominent alternatives are Rahul’s mother and former Congress president Sonia Gandhi and his sister Priyanka, who joined the party formally earlier this year.

Since independence, the Congress has had a Gandhi-Nehru family member as its head except for few years since 1991 following the assassination of former PM Rajiv Gandhi (Rahul’s father), till Sonia Gandhi joined the party and became its president.