Even as talk is on of Rahul Gandhi’s elevation to the top post in the Congress before the year-end, the Monsoon Session of Parliament has seen his mother and party president, Sonia Gandhi, leading the party from the front.

For four days this week, the 68-year-old leader has been on the protest front, raising slogans along with party MPs. Senior party leaders who say Mr. Gandhi is still playing a supporting role told The Hindu that it was Ms. Gandhi who was giving the directions and fashioning the party strategy, widely described as a maximalist one.

“Despite our poor results in last year’s Lok Sabha elections, Ms. Gandhi has demonstrated this week that the party still has leadership; experience counts,” a senior Congress Rajya Sabha member said.

To those who express surprise that the Congress president should have adopted such a posture, which is in sharp contrast to the way she led the party during the years that the Vajpayee government had been in power, a senior party leader said: “Sonia Gandhi knows that the Congress needs to reinvent itself in the changed circumstances. She has demonstrated that the party can respond to different sorts of situations and circumstances.”

From 1998 to 2004, the Congress had been a much larger party in the Lok Sabha. In 1998, it won 141 seats, and in 1999, 114. The BJP, which came to power after the elections in those years, stayed steady at 182.

The gap between the two parties was much smaller then; the physical presence of the Congress in the Lower House larger. In those six years, Congress members seldom entered the Well of the Lok Sabha or disrupted proceedings. The party was, by and large, in those years, a picture of parliamentary decorum.

Today, the Congress, with just 44 members, is different. A highlight of this year’s Budget Session was the visually powerful spectacle of 14 political parties, led by the Congress president, walking from Parliament House to the Rashtrapati Bhavan to reflect the nationwide negative response to the Land Acquisition (Amendment) Ordinance.

Janata Dal(U) leader Sharad Yadav and Trinamool Congress member Derek O’Brien jointly asked Ms. Gandhi to lead the delegation, a measure of her wide acceptability in the Opposition.

At the time, a senior Congress leader told The Hindu, “These Opposition leaders accepted Ms. Gandhi’s leadership — they would not have accepted Rahul in the same way. It is just as well he’s not in town.”

In this session, in the first 10 days or so, it was under her leadership that the party focussed on the demand for the resignations of senior BJP leaders against whom there are allegations of corruption and conflict of interest. And from Monday, there was the additional issue of the suspension of 25 Congress MPs by Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan. The party then took its protest outside the House.

If the suspension saw the Congress gather support from several other Opposition parties, it also helped the party target the ruling party for what it describes as “unconstitutional” methods to run Parliament.

There are, of course, a few Congress MPs like Shashi Tharoor who feel the party should not adopt a “maximalist” position, but they are in a minority.

A majority believe that Ms. Gandhi’s approach has not only ensured the party’s voice is being heard, but, more important, it has galvanised dispirited party workers, readying them for the long, hard political battle ahead.