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.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of