Sonia Gandhi meets G-23 leaders, second meeting in 4 days

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 22

Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday continued her engagement with the leaders of G-23, meeting MPs Anand Sharma, Manish Tewari and Vivek Tankha today.

The way forward

• A major demand of G-23 leaders is to revive the parliamentary board
• They feel the Congress Working Committee, a large body, needs to give policy direction to the party
• A smaller, more compact parliamentary board needs to take policy decisions at the highest level

G-23 veteran Ghulam Nabi Azad also met Sonia Gandhi for the second time in four days.

Sources say that Sonia has decided to productively engage G-23 members and that “the thinking in the party is that G-23 leaders are Congress people who want institutional reforms and they have clearly said they are going nowhere”.

It has been learnt that serious discussions are underway on “creating mechanisms for collective, inclusive leadership and decision-making in the Congress”, as recently demanded by G-23 leaders and some other Congress veterans who attended a meeting called by Azad.

The revival of the parliamentary board is a major demand of G-23 leaders who feel the Congress Working Committee, a large body, needs to give policy direction to the party and a smaller, more compact parliamentary board needs to take policy decisions at the highest level as it used to do during the times of late prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

G-23 leaders have also sought changes in the organisation across states, including poll-bound Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, rather than only five states where the party lost in the recent elections.

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