Sonia Gandhi to be chief of Congress Parliamentary Party

 Congress leader Sonia Gandhi has been named the leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP).

Sonia’s name was proposed by former prime minister Manmohan Singh at the first meeting of the newly-elected Congress Lok Sabha MPs at the Central Hall of Parliament this morning.

All 52 Lok Sabha MPs of the Congress are present at the meeting, besides its RajyaSabha members, according to reports. Besides electing a new leader, the MPs will chalk out the party’s strategy for the upcoming session of Parliament, they said.

They will also elect the Congress leader in the Lok Sabha. This will be the first official meeting that Congress president Rahul Gandhi will attend after the 25 May meeting of the party’s working committee, where he had offered to quit as Congress chief.

The Congress Working Committee has already rejected his offer and unanimously passed a resolution authorising him to bring about structural changes in the party to revamp it.

This is the second time that the NDA government will not be faced by a leader of the Opposition as no party has managed the numbers – it requires 55 MPs of the Opposition party to elect a Leader of the Opposition. The Congress, the single Opposition party, has managed only 52 seats.

Also, in the 16th Lok Sabha, that was elected in 2014, there was no Leader of the Opposition with the Congress, the main Opposition party, totalling up  44 members in the Lower House.