Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi will address a meeting of the Congress Parliamentary party on Tuesday morning. This will be the first occasion when a section of the party leadership will have a face-to-face interaction with him in a formal setting after the results of the five State elections came out on March 11.
Party MPs said that since Mr. Gandhi’s style is to seek comments after his speech, many of them were likely to urge him not to waste any more time but to get cracking on devising a new party narrative, formulating a strategy and naming a team for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections immediately.
Leadership change
The CPP met last on March 9, two days before the results came in. On that occasion too, though the outcome of the polls was still not known, party MPs had told him that it was time he formally took over as president and got working on a plan for the next two years.
The results only underscore the need for urgency on the part of the leadership to devise a way forward, party sources said.
“We may have done very badly in Uttar Pradesh, but we won Punjab, and were the single largest party in Manipur and in Goa,” said a party MP. “This means the situation is still retrievable. But it won’t be for too long.”
