Rahul Gandhi, tipped to be a future Indian prime minister, is set to take over as president of the country’s ruling Congress Party by the end of the year, a report said on Saturday.
Rahul was named in August to a four-member panel to run the party’s affairs, while his mother, current Congress Party President Sonia Gandhi, recovered from surgery for an undisclosed condition.
The Economic Times newspaper said several unnamed party leaders, including a Cabinet minister, had confirmed that Rahul would take over the party’s reins in “four to eight weeks.”
Photo: EPA
Sonia Gandhi, who engineered the party’s return to power in 2004, would restrict her role to providing broad directions to the party and government, the newspaper said.
A senior aide to Rahul said he was aware of no such plans.
“Whenever the party takes such a decision it will be officially announced, but there is no such thing happening in the party,” said the aide, who asked not to be identified.
Congress General-Secretary Digvijay Singh said on Friday “the young leader [Rahul] should now play a bigger role. Rahul has to come into the mainstream.”
“Right now he is looking only after Youth Congress and the student wing of the party. I feel now he has to look after us all,” he said.
There has been media speculation Rahul could be appointed party chief on Nov. 19, the birthday of his late grandmother, former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi.
Rahul would be stepping into the fray as Congress battles its biggest crisis since taking power in 2004, facing a string of corruption scandals and soaring inflation.
The party also faces a string of key elections next year, including one in pivotal Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.
Sonia Gandhi appointed her son to the post of Congress Party general-secretary for youth affairs in 2007, a move seen as cementing his position as heir apparent.
“The whole plan of Sonia has always been that the scepter must be handed to the son,” political analyst Inder Malhotra said.
The Gandhi dynasty, which stems from first post--independence Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and has no link to independence hero Mahatma Gandhi, has exerted huge influence in India during most of its post--independence history.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.