Is it time for a non-Gandhi to lead Congress? Priyanka and Rahul believe so

As Congress grapples with a leadership crisis, the Gandhi family believes that it is time for a non-Gandhi to helm the 135-year-old party.

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who took a plunge into active politics ahead of the Lok Sabha elections last year, has said that she was in “full agreement” with her brother Rahul Gandhi that a non-Gandhi should be appointed as the president of Congress.

“And perhaps not in the (resignation) letter but elsewhere, he said that none of us should be the president of the party and I am in full agreement with him. I think that the party should find its own path also,” Priyanka has said in an interview that appears in the book ‘India Tomorrow: Conversations with the Next Generation of Political Leaders’.

Besides Priyanka, the book features interviews with young political leaders including Rahul Gandhi, Aditya Thackeray, Akhilesh Yadav, Rajya Vardhan Rathore, Supriya Sule among others. The interviews with Priyanka and Rahul were conducted in 2019 before Congress faced fresh challenges in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

Both Priyanka and Rahul believe that ideologically the party is clear about its stand but it has not been communicated with that clarity to the public in a long time.

“I think part of that issue is perhaps the internal shift of some of the leaders of the Congress party towards the end of the last government where ideological stances were diluted to some extent,” she told the authors Pradeep Chibber and Harsh Shah.

“I think where we might have failed is in the public articulation of the ideology,” Priyanka said and favoured a brainstorming session for the party to come out with a clear vision.

Rahul told the authors that he did not see the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as a failure of the Congress ideology but as a victory for the RSS-BJP propaganda machine.

“As a politician, I respect the will of the people. They wanted to try Mr. Narendra Modi again, okay, try him again,” the former Congress President said.

Rahul said while Congress believed in building consensus to take India forward, the RSS-BJP have a “narrow, rigid, view of India that they want to impose on the Indian people.”

“Eventually, it is the rising anger against the imposition of their ideology on every Indian, that will lead to the electoral downfall of the BJP,” Rahul said when asked about how he planned to reinvent the party to make it electorally competitive against the BJP.