According to party sources, the meeting will be held at AICC headquarters in Delhi where the 'Bharat Jodo Yatra' and upcoming organizational programs shall be discussed among other issues.
The Congress party’s ambitious Bharat Jodo Yatra is set to be led by former party chief Rahul Gandhi, cover at least 16 states and will have enough space to accommodate other like-minded opposition parties.
The march, starting from October 2, will be flagged off from Kanyakumari and end in Kashmir. The preparations for it has already started. A committee led by former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Digvijaya Singh had been formed to plan for the ambitious yatra that aims to spread the message of unity across India and mark the Congress party’s first pan-Indian march in Independent India.
The central planning group for the coordination of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, the Congress party’s biggest non-electoral campaign, will have Digvijaya Singh, Sachin Pilot, Shashi Tharoor, Ravneet Singh Bittu, KJ George, Jothi Mani, Pradyut Bordoloi, Jitu Patwari, and Saleem Ahmed as its members.
States such as Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab are likely to be covered by the march, according to two leaders involved in the planning. The party plans to complete the tentative 3,500km long journey in five to six months and the entire route would be covered by foot.
The planning for the yatra started during the Udaipur chintan shivir (brainstorming workshop) and many Congress leaders were keen that the party announces the yatra will be led by Gandhi in the Udaipur Sankalp.
Meanwhile, the Congress witnessed its political footprint shrinking considerably with the fall of the Maha Vikas Aghadi government in Maharashtra.
The party is facing major setback in Goa as Bharatiya Janata Party General Secretary C.T. Ravi, who is also the party's Goa in-charge, on Monday claimed that 12 MLAs of the Goa Congress are ready to leave the party and join the BJP.
The Goa Congress on Monday said it was seeking disqualification of two of its leaders - Michael Lobo and Digambar Kamat - from the Assembly over allegations that the two senior functionaries were trying to engineer defections in the opposition camp for a switchover to the BJP.
This comes as five Goa Congress MLAs, who went incommunicado a day before, attended the state Assembly proceedings on the first day of the monsoon session on Monday, and claimed there was "nothing wrong" in the opposition party.
Hours after the Goa Congress unit moved a disqualification petition against party leader Lobo and former chief minister Kamat for “anti-party activities", the former denied any “hobnobbing" with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The grand old party moved the petition against Lobo and Kamat before Assembly speaker Ramesh Tawadkar.
The party has also reason to worry in Jharkhand where fissures have been developing between the Congress and the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), the dominant partner in the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the eastern state, over many issues.
In another massive setback to India’s ‘grand old party’, two senior Congress leaders from Uttarakhand — spokesperson Rajendra Prasad Raturi and state Mahila Congress vice president Kamlesh Raman — joined the Aam Aadmi Party on Monday. While Raturi said he spent 45 years in Congress, Raman claimed she gave 28 years to the party.
