TEAM HERALD
NEW DELHI: Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi will not be projected as the prime ministerial candidate neither in the one-day AICC session here on Friday nor before the general elections. Instead, he will lead the party’s election campaign in the Lok Sabha polls.
Party President Sonia Gandhi used her veto to shut down the chorus for Rahul at an extended meeting of the Congress working committee (CWC) here on Thursday. She intervened when one after another, half a dozen members pressed for declaring Rahul as the PM candidate and snubbed them for unnecessarily deviating from the meeting’s agenda.
Both mother and son came prepared since after Rahul had himself ruled out his anointment in the Congress core group meeting on Wednesday as “undemocratic.”
Sonia echoed this view in the CWC meeting that it is always the elected MPs who elect the leader and everyone knows who that leader is. She sought to stub off the issue in the CWC meeting, lest it overshadow the AICC session, defeating the purpose of the gathering in the election year.
The Rahul issue was raked up at the start by Kerala PCC chief and minister Ramesh Chennitala and picked up by at least four others, namely Union Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, general secretaries Gurudas Kamat and B K Hariprasad, and Assam PCC chief Bhubaneswar Kalita.
Sonia overruled them, asserting that there is no such Congress tradition to go to polls with a PM candidate and there is no such compulsion just because some other party declares its own PM candidate. West Bengal PCC president Pradip Bhattacharya tried to argue with her that it helps in the election if there is a clarity.
