Congress poll debacle: Kamal Nath jumps to Rahul's defence

New Delhi:  Coming to the defence of Rahul Gandhi, Congress leader Kamal Nath on Saturday said there was no need for him to resign in the wake of the poll debacle but felt that the party should introspect and put its house in order.

"Rahul Gandhi was at the forefront only for the last eight months. You are talking as if he has nothing to do with the performance and the achievements of the Government... What logic is this?... I don't think he is a liability or is out of sync," Nath said when asked if the party vice president should resign in the wake of the Lok Sabha poll results.

Arguing that the party had made Rahul its vice president, he told CNN-IBN, "only the party can remove him but it does not want to do so."

When asked about a blue-print for revival of the Congress, the outgoing Union Minister said attention should be paid on improving party structure at the block-level.

"As far as revival issue is concerned, Congress needs to look at it at the block level. Why did that happen? All welfare schemes have not been recognised as our achievement by people... We have to look into structural issues," Nath said.

"We must build our state organisations and make them more autonomous. We must make more people join the party and bring new voters what Congress stands for and about its ideologies. It has to be done at the block level not at the state level," he said.

The senior leader also admitted that corruption and inflation were big issues in the elections that also led to the defeat of the Congress.

Nath stressed that there was a need to "introspect and discuss with each other in every state. We should put our heads together to see whether we failed to deliver it or in the message itself."

On the charges of practising appeasement politics, Nath said, "We don't want to practice appeasement politics but if it seems to be appeasement politics. Then we really need to be correcting ourselves."