“A Non-Gandhi should be Congress president,” says Priyanka Gandhi in new book

Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has said in her book that she fully agrees with brother Rahul Gandhi when he says a ‘non-Gandhi’ should be appointed the Congress president.

The book goes on to say that Rahul too had stated that the Congress should find a chief outside the family, news agency IANS reported. However, Rahul and Priyanka’s mother Sonia Gandhi was appointed as the interim president of the Congress in August last year.

“Perhaps not in the (resignation) letter but elsewhere he has said that none of us should be the president of the party and I am in full agreement with him,” the book quotes Priyanka Gandhi as having said in her interview to the authors.

She has also insisted that a party president, even if not from the Gandhi family, would be her ‘boss’. “If he (party president) tells me tomorrow that he doesn’t want me in Uttar Pradesh but wants me to be in Andaman and Nicobar, then I would jolly well go to Andaman and Nicobar,” Vadra has been quoted as saying.

The revelations have been made at a time when Sonia Gandhi has completed a year as Congress interim president and there have been calls from within the party to hold elections to the Congress Working Committee (CWC) and appoint a permanent party chief.

The news agency report quoted Congress sources as saying that Priyanka had made the remarks last year following Rahul Gandhi’s resignation, when the situation was different.

Priyanka also speaks of how she discussed with her children what many media reports had to say about her family members — back when they were still young. One such article, she says, alleged that her Italian grandmother, Sonia Gandhi’s mother, was an agent for the Russian spy agency, KGB, and “used to smuggle antiques out of India”.