Rahul Gandhi on Friday heard the grievances of senior leaders from Haryana and sought suggestions for strengthening the party before finalising who would be the new leader in the state to prepare the party for the 2024 battle.

Sonia Gandhi joined the meeting at Rahul’s residence where the differences among senior leaders came to the fore. Though the party talked of collective leadership and unity of purpose, it is not a secret that former chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who is part of the G-23 collective of dissidents, is opposed to the leadership of state unit chief Kumari Selja and wants the reins in his own hands.

Sources said an attempt was made at the meeting to extract promises from the senior leaders to accept whatever decision Sonia would announce over the next few days. The dominant view was that the Congress has always been an umbrella organisation representing the interests of all social groups and communities, which is an argument against the politics of Jat dominance symbolised by Hooda.

The BJP occupied that space in Haryana when the Congress pursued Jat-centric politics under Hooda’s leadership, which Rahul has been trying to change in the past few years. Kumari Selja, a Dalit, was made the state chief on the basis of that calculation but the experiment failed to yield the desired results in the last Assembly election. There was a perception that Hooda could have pulled it off had he been given a few months more.

Hooda then joined the G-23, but the Congress leadership is now trying to resolve that problem as the perception of a divided house is hurting the party. That quest brought Hooda again to the centre stage, considerably enhancing his bargaining power.

Sources said both Sonia and Rahul were now keen to settle the Haryana leadership issue at the earliest to be able to take advantage of the anti-incumbency in the state. If Hooda is won over, along with a few more G-23 leaders, the dissenter group can be dismantled. While G-23 leader Ghulam Nabi Azad is already out of the Rajya Sabha, his deputy Anand Sharma is serving his last few days. The party will have to find ways to accommodate these leaders to water down the sense of unease.

Apart from Hooda and Selja, those who attended Friday’s meeting were Randeep Singh Surjewala, Kuldeep Bishnoi, Kiran Chaudhary, Deepinder Singh Hooda and Ajay Singh Yadav.