Rahul Gandhi begins Haryana poll preparations

NEW DELHI: Congress president Rahul Gandhi kick-started poll preparations in election-bound Haryana as he met senior partymen on Thursday evening.

Gandhi, who had resigned as party president at a meeting of Congress Working Committee on May 25, has started his political engagements with a slew of meetings with leaders from election-bound states of Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and New Delhi. On Thursday, he met senior members of Haryana’s state coordination committee headed by former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda.

According to sources, the senior leaders discussed Lok Sabha debacle and the forthcoming elections with Gandhi. The leaders told him that there was an urgent need to strengthen the party and constitute district committees. Gandhi told the leaders to fight unitedly and not allow personal differences to come in the way. Kiran Chaudhary, Kuldeep Bishnoi, Naveen Jindal and Randeep Surjewala could not attend the meeting. Gandhi told leaders that a mechanism would be finalised to take the party into elections in Haryana.


After a detailed discussion, the coordination committee members urged Gandhi to take back his resignation. But Gandhi remained adamant. “He said that somebody needed to take responsibility for the debacle. He was very certain that he would not continue and said that the defeat happened under his watch and he should take the responsibility,” a leader told ET.