NEW DELHI, MAY 27: With the Congress going through its worst summer of discontent in recent times, senior CWC member Rajesh Pilot's remarks on Sonia Gandhi and the party's dwindling fortunes, in an interview to a private TV channel, have added a new dimension to the ongoing criticism of the party leadership.In a rather candid interview, Pilot told the TV channel that the party needed to "take many hard decisions in the coming days, like the Labour Party in Britain did some years ago, but it was for party president Sonia Gandhi to decide whether she should step aside".Party circles here were of the view that Pilot's remarks, though not a direct attack on Sonia's leadership, were definitely a bold critique of the party's present state of affairs and how things had gone wrong under the present dispensation.Viewed along with his equally frank comments at a rally in Jhansi, where he had said that the party had abandoned the vision set out by former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, this can be seen as the emergence of a more aggressive Pilot.The coming together of Pilot and Jitendra Prasada is already causing a lot of discomfort to Sonia loyalists who are now engaged in a massive damage-control operation to rein in things before they get out of control. It is probably in this context that the party's reaction to Pilot's comments was rather muted with senior party leaders finding "nothing offensive" in them.With organisational elections around the corner and voices of discontent on the rise, the party leadership does not want to take the so-called dissidents head-on.In the interview, Pilot said it was a fact that initially, when Sonia became the Congress president, "there were good steps, good initiatives, a lot of expectations and we won all the three states. But unfortunately, there is. somewhere there is a communication gap between us.."Asked, in the context of the Labour Party, whether it was not imperative to "get rid of the leadership first of all", Pilot quipped: "Well, that's for the leadership.."
