Sonia Gandhi will remain Congress president for now, the party decided today after a fiery seven-hour meeting that began with the 73-year-old announcing she wanted to be relieved of the job and the party should start looking for her replacement after an explosive letter written by 23 top leaders calling for “a full-time, visible leadership”. Sonia Gandhi reportedly said in her closing remarks that she held “no ill-will” towards anyone in the party, a remark intended at the dissent-letter writers. “I am hurt but they are my colleagues, bygones are bygones, let us work together,” she said, ending the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting on a note of conciliation.

Sonia Gandhi, who at the start of the online Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting, asked the party to begin deliberations to set in place a process to find her replacement as Congress president, a post she took on an interim basis after her son Rahul Gandhi quit over the party’s national election defeat. Rahul Gandhi, who was believed to be at his mother’s home during the meeting, hit out at the signatories to the letter and questioned such a move “when the Congress was at its weakest, when it was battling crises in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan and when the Congress president (Sonia Gandhi) was unwell”.

1. But reports that Rahul Gandhi had also accused the letter-writers of colluding with the BJP led to an unprecedented backlash. Leaders like Kapil Sibal – who is key among the signatories to the letter, shot off a tweet hitting out at Rahul Gandhi, which is rare for the Congress. Kapil Sibal soon deleted the tweet and posted: “Was informed by Rahul Gandhi personally that he never said what was attributed to him. I therefore withdraw my tweet.” The Congress also tweeted that Rahul Gandhi “hadn’t said a word of this nature nor alluded to it” and blamed the reports on “false media discourse or misinformation”.
2. Ghulam Nabi Azad,