Congress leader, Shashi Tharoor who is contesting in the party president elections has been engaged in the hectic campaign. On Monday, he spoke about the G-23 group, which had written a letter to Sonia Gandhi about two years ago about the crucial need for reconstructing needed within the party. Another senior Congress leader, Mallikarjun Kharge is also in the race to be the party president. Many of the letter writers are now backing up Kharge.
“First of all, there is no G-23 group. There never was,” Tharoor said. “As far as I can tell you, a couple of seniors wrote the letter. They invited a large number of people to support them. It so happened that the covid lockdown was on, and only 23 people were available to sign. There could have been 100 or more,” he added.
His comments come amid swipes from the rival leaders as Congress gears up to hold its elections for the crucial post on October 17. Over the weekend, the BJP’s Amit Malviya tweeted that the leaders of the rebel group had abandoned “one of their own”.
Kharge added that there was no G-23 group on Sunday. He added that he had told Tharoor that a consensus candidate would be preferable, but that Tharoor insisted on a vote for the “sake of democracy.”
Tharoor claimed to have more than 60 proposers for the Congress presidential nomination after Kharge was accompanied to the nomination process on Friday by many of his prominent party colleagues, including Anand Sharma and Manish Tewari of the G-23.