Senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid said the Congress could not analyse reasons for the party's debacle in the Lok Sabha polls held in May this year as its leader, Rahul Gandhi, "had walked away".
The remark put into focus the acute leadership crisis facing the grand old party, with Rahul's mother Sonia Gandhi stepping in as interim Congress president after the former's resignation following the poll verdict.
“We haven't really got together to analyse why we got defeated. Our biggest problem is our leader has walked away. It kind of left a vacuum,” AP quoted Khurshid as saying, who added: "Sonia Gandhi stepped in, but there is more than an indication that she is treating herself as a stop-gap arrangement. I wish it wasn’t so."
The Congress secured only 52 of the 542 parliamentary seats in the last general elections, as against the 303 won by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Khurshid even predicted a bleak future for the Congress party in the upcoming Haryana and Maharashtra Assembly elections and the other elections coming up.
The Congress has faced a slew of rebellions and exits ahead of the assembly polls, with analysts blaming the party's post-Lok Sabha poll debacle as well as the lack of a clear leadership.
Results in both Maharashtra and Haryana are due on October 24.
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