The long-delayed organisational elections of the Congress party will be held by June 2021. This was decided at a virtual meeting of the Congress Working Committee, the party’s highest decision-making body, on Friday. The decision comes amid internal discontent over the alleged arbitrary running of the party, which is being led by an interim president for more than one year.

Making the announcement, party leader KC Venugopal said, “Congress Working Committee has decided that there will be an elected Congress president by June 2021,” reports news agency ANI.

Many among the party’s top leadership have been demanding a full-time and active party president and an organisational overhaul. The CWC had, in an earlier meeting, decided to hold organisational elections, after a group of 23 leaders, including Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Bhupinder Hooda, Prithviraj Chavan, Kapil Sibal, Manish Tewari and Mukul Wasnik, wrote a letter to interim president Sonia Gandhi pointing to the alleged arbitrariness in running the party and a need to hold party polls.

Sonia Gandhi had last month met some of these ‘letter-writers’ and discussed the issues raised by them. She has been heading the party in an interim arrangement put in place after Rahul Gandhi quit as president in 2019 after serious reverses in Lok Sabha elections.

Addressing the meeting, Sonia Gandhi attacked the government over its alleged insensitivity towards farmers’ issues, economy and internal security. “National security is thoroughly compromised, government’s silence is deafening,” Gandhi said.

She added that the Congress position on the issue of the farm laws has been clear from the very beginning. “We reject them categorically because they will destroy the foundations of food security that are based on the three pillars of MSP, public procurement and PDS,” Sonia Gandhi said.