Senior Congress Parliamentarian Anand Sharma, who stepped down as head of the "steering committee" of the party's Himachal Pradesh unit, has suggested the party look beyond the Gandhis for its leadership since Rahul Gandhi declined to take over the top post last week, news outlet NDTV reported.
Sharma reiterated that India's main opposition party Congress wasn't all about the Gandhis and several other politicians had given their all to keep the party intact during its earlier crisis.
The senior Congressman claimed that even when the charismatic former prime minister, and Rahul's grandmother, Indira Gandhi was expelled from Congress in 1978, the party survived and returned to power with a thumping majority in the 1980 General Election.
This was after Congress had suffered a humiliating defeat in the 1977 polls with Indira Gandhi herself losing her constituency, the city of Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh state.
"Those were people like us... This party belongs to all of us," Sharma said in an interview with NDTV. "There was no reason why the list should be confined to Rahul Gandhi and [Rahul's sister] Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. Is the Congress only confined to these two names? Are we not ridiculing the history of the Congress party."
Once the dominant political force in India after having ruled the country for nearly 60 years since its independence from the British in 1947, Congress has suffered a series of defeats since PM Narendra Modi came to power in 2014.
Of the south Asian nation's 28 states, the party currently governs only two states - Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh.
In addition to that, for the first time in its history, Congress lost back-to-back parliamentary elections in 2014 and 2019 to the BJP and recorded its worst ever tally of 44 seats in the previous Lok Sabha (Lower House) polls.
On Sunday, an affronted Sharma resigned from a key post in his home state of Himachal Pradesh after accusing the local unit of sidelining him from the party's affairs there.
"Reiterating that I am a lifelong Congressman and remain firm on my convictions... given the continuing exclusion and insults, as a self-respecting person - I was left with no choice," Sharma posted on Twitter as he announced his resignation from the party post.
Polls in Himachal Pradesh are due in November and Sharma's move to relinquish his post could hurt the party's prospects in the state, considering he's widely considered one of the most prominent Congress faces there.
Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra are the two children of former prime minister from 1984 to 1989 Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1991. Rajiv was the son of former prime minister Indira Gandhi who was herself the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, one of the major architects of Indian independence and the country's first prime minister.
Sharma's decision to step down from the party position in Himachal Pradesh came days after another senior leader Ghulam Nabi Azad, who served as state chief of Jammu and Kashmir, resigned as chairman of the campaign committee in the union territory.