The Congress‘ top brass, including party chief Mallikarjun Kharge and former AICC chief Sonia Gandhi, met on Friday to deliberate on the party’s strategy going forward after Rahul Gandhi‘s disqualification from Lok Sabha. A meeting was already scheduled for Friday evening but after Rahul Gandhi’s conviction, top leaders assembled at 6 pm at the party headquarters with his disqualification being top of the agenda. Besides Kharge and Sonia Gandhi, Congress general secretaries Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, K C Venugopal, Jairam Ramesh, Rajiv Shukla and Tariq Anwar, senior leaders P Chidambaram, Anand Sharma, Ambika Soni, Mukul Wasnik, Salman Khurshid and Pawan Kumar Bansal, among others, were also present at the meeting.

Sources said Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification and party’s strategy and plans for agitations were top of the agenda at the meeting.

Rahul Gandhi was on Friday disqualified from Lok Sabha following his conviction by a Surat court in a 2019 criminal defamation case, an action the party termed an attempt to “silence” his voice as it vowed to fight the battle legally and politically.

Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal launched an attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday and said under his leadership, an attempt is being made to destroy the country. In a speech in the Delhi Assembly, he also accused Lieutenant Governor V K Saxena of obstructing the work of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government. “I want to tell BJP people that under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s leadership, an attempt is being made to destroy the country. Those who want to destroy the country should be in BJP and those who want to save the country should leave BJP,” he said.

There was an uproar in the Assembly when Kejriwal spoke about the prime minister.

Referring to the disqualification of Rahul Gandhi from Lok Sabha, Kejriwal targeted the central government and said “they are scared”. Gandhi was disqualification from the Lok Sabha upon his conviction and sentencing in a criminal defamation case.

Kejriwal asked LG Saxena to work together with the government for the development of Delhi.

“I want to tell LG sahab, ‘You have come from Gujarat. You are our guest’. I don’t think he would be knowing even the names of Delhi roads. But we don’t want fights. We want to work together. What will future generations say? They were fighting. We have to take sewer connections to every household, buy new buses, improve traffic situation…let’s do it together.

“We will work with you. It is not India-Pakistan war. When CM and LG start working together, it will actually be a double engine government,” he said.