New Delhi: After the drubbing in the recently held Bihar elections, Congress leader and former union minister Kapil Sibal has called for ‘experienced minds, experienced hands and those who understand political realities’ to revive the organisation.
The senior leader said that the ‘time for introspection is over’.
“… we need to do several things at several levels – organisationally, articulation in the media in whatever form, putting up people who the people want to listen to, providing an active, thoughtful leadership who can articulate with a lot of circumspection,” Kapil Sibal is quoted in Indian Express.
Calling upon the Congressmen to recognise that they are in decline, the leader said that the people have not reposed their confidence in the Congress even where the party is an alternative.
“So the time for introspection is over. We know the answers. The Congress must be brave and willing to recognise them. Since there has been no dialogue and there seems to be no effort for a dialogue by the leadership and since there is no forum to express my views, I am constrained to express them publicly. I am a Congressman and will remain a Congressman and hope and pray that the Congress provides the alternative to a power structure which has subverted all the values that the nation stands for,” Sibal said in the interview.
Sibal was one of the 23 Congress leaders behind the “dissent letter” that caused a clash within the party in August. However, this had yielded no fruits, besides the downgrading of key letter writers.
“First we have to have a conversation; with experienced minds, experienced hands, with people who understand the political realities of India, people who know what and how to articulate in the media, people who know how to get people to listen to them… We need alliances, we need to reach out to people. We cannot anymore expect people to come to us. We are not the kind of force that we used to be. We need to reach out to others by those who are experienced in this business. But in order to do that we have to have a conversation. I have not heard the leadership tell me anything. So I don’t know. I only hear voices which surround the leadership… We are yet to hear from the Congress party their views on our recent performance in Bihar and in the by-elections. Maybe they think all is well and that it should be business as usual,” he said.
In last week’s Bihar election results, the opposition won 110 seats and Tejashwi Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) emerged as the largest party. The Congress, which contested 70 seats won only 19.
