After suffering a series of defeats in the lok Sabha and assembly by-elections in Uttar Pradesh, the state unit of the Congress held a meeting of senior leaders here on Sunday to chalk out strategies to revive the party at the grass root level but many senior leaders preferred to stay away.
The meeting chaired the AICC General secretary and in-charge of UP Madhusudan Mistri along with UP congress president Nirmal Khatri and legislature party leader Pradeep Mathur, however yeild no result as several senior leaders gave a miss to this meeting. Senior leaders Beni Prasad Verma, Salman Khursheed, Raj Babbar, Anil Shastri, R P N Singh and Noor Bano were among the 30 leaders who were specially invited to attend the meeting but they did not attend it.
Briefing reporters about the outcome of the meeting which lasted for about 3 hours, Mistri said that several suggestions were made by the leaders which included more transparent procedure to select candidates for the elections, stringent discplinary action against the erring leaders, better communication between the leadership and the workers and strengthening of the party organisation.
‘The leaders want that the candidates selected to contest any elections should be announced one year before the polls and they should be selected through the panel sent by the district,’ he said. Mistry said in many constituencies we lost only because the party candidate did not get enough time to prepare, Had the candidates announced earlier they would have performed better. But this never happened and we should not repeat this mistake
He said that old party leaders like Mohsina Kidwai and Ammar Rizvi talked about how Indira Gandhi used to take meetings of the leaders. Mistri wiil chair the meeting of the district and city congress presidents on Monday and will announce strategies to strengthen the party through agitational programme. The two-day meeting was called to discuss party performance threadbare. All the party MPs and legislators and district presidents were asked to attend the meeting. A senior Congress leader said that those leaders who gave this meeting a miss should be issued a show cause notice.
“If senior leaders, MPs and legislators do not take party meetings seriously how can we expect the party workers to work diligently for the party,” he asked.