Rahul will be PM if Cong wins, says Sheila Dikshit at AICC session

A day after the hype and anticipation over whether Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi will be declared prime ministerial candidate of the Congress party ended with a whimper, former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit said nobody is in any doubt about who the party’s next prime minister will be. [caption id=“attachment_131115” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  PTI[/caption] Speaking just before the start of the All India Congress Committee session in Delhi’s Talkatora stadium, Dikshit said everybody wants Rahul to be the “next prime minister”. “Unka hona laazmi hai, aavashyak hai,” she said. (His position is natural, necessary.) “The Congress party is only following a tradition in not declaring who its prime ministerial candidate is,” she said. On Thursday evening, following a meeting of the Congress top brass, the party announced Rahul Gandhi as head of the election campaign for 2014, but stopped short of naming him the PM nominee. That took out much of the sheen from today’s AICC session, expected by many to be a historic one following a possible announcement of the baton having been passed on to Rahul. While several party leaders had expressed their wish that Rahul Gandhi be declared the party’s nominee for the top post, Sonia GAndhi had exercised her veto to stop short discussion on a PM candidate, stating that the party tradition was to not name a candidate. Whether they announced it or otherwise, not only were Rahul Gandhi’s posters prominent at Friday’s AICC session, but Priyanka Gandhi also, for the first time, featured prominently on the posters at the Talkatora stadium.