Congress loyalists' forum urges Sonia Gandhi to take over reins of AICC

Hyderabad: The Congress Loyalists Forum has urged United Progressive Front chairperson Sonia Gandhi to take over the reins of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) and bail out the party from the present crisis. Members of the Forum Marri Shashidhar Reddy, V Hanumantha Rao, M Kodanda Reddy, S Chandrasekhar, B Kamalakar Rao, A Syam Mohan and G Niranjan have written a letter to Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday.

In the letter, they said as she has been the Chairperson of UPA twice and presently the Leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party, she must be the saviour of the situation. They said, "the people of Telangana were able to realise their long cherished dream for a separate State only because of your magnanimous decision. Unfortunately, the TRS capitalised on this and we lost the 2014 assembly elections."

The leaders said after four years of failed promises and misrule, people of Telangana were disenchanted with the TRS. However, the Congress could not capitalise on this in the Assembly elections because of many lost opportunities to reach out to the people over the years and gross mismanagement of the process of electioneering at the State level.

Winning three seats in the Lok Sabha elections this year is not going to be a consolation as Congress lost a lot of space to the BJP, which won four seats, after having lost deposits in over 100 Assembly seats in Assembly elections of December 2018.

The decision of Rahul Gandhi to step down as Congress President has further demoralised the rank and file. His reluctance to relent on his decision has created a vacuum in the organisational structure for too long a period, giving ammunition to political adversaries. The spate of desertions from the party had its own impact as well.