Lok Sabha elections 2024: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi should consider stepping back if the party fails to get the desired results in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, political strategist Prashant Kishor has suggested. He noted that Rahul Gandhi, for all practical purposes, is running the Congress and has been unable to either step aside or let somebody else steer the Congress despite his inability to deliver in the last 10 years.
"This according to me is also anti-democratic," said Kishor, who had churned out a revival plan for the grand old party but left the camp due to the disagreements between him and its leadership over the execution of his strategy.
"When you are doing the same work for the last 10 years without any success, then there is no harm in taking a break...You should allow someone else to do it for five years. Your mother did it," he said, recalling Sonia Gandhi's decision to keep away from politics following her husband Rajiv Gandhi's assassination and let P V Narasimha Rao take charge in 1991.
“But it seems to Rahul Gandhi that he knows everything. Nobody can help you if you do not recognise the need for help. He believes he needs someone who can execute what he thinks is right. It is not possible,” Kishor said.
Prashant Kishor on Rahul Gandhi's decision to step down as Congress president
Recalling Rahul Gandhi’s decision to resign as the Congress president following the party’s poll debacle in 2019 general elections, Kishor said that the Wayanad MP had then written that he would step back and let somebody else do the job. But, in effect, he has been doing contrary to what he had written.
Many Congress leaders will admit privately that they cannot take any decision in the party, even about a single seat or seat sharing with alliance partners "unless they get the approval from xyz," he said, referring to their need to defer to Rahul Gandhi.
Congress bigger than any individual: Prashant Kishor
Congress and its supporters are bigger than any individual and Rahul Gandhi should not be stubborn that it must be he who will deliver for the party despite repeated failures, Kishor said.
He said that Rahul Gandhi’s allegations regarding BJP’s influence on the judiciary and Election Commission may not be completely true as the Congress was reduced to 44 seats from 206 in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls when the grand old party was in power and not the saffron camp which had little influence over various institutions.
(With PTI inputs)
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