So finally Congress concedes defeat even before the polling in the upcoming Assembly elections! Khurshid agrees Rah… https://t.co/O8d70Oe5Zv — Sambit Patra (@sambitswaraj) 1570590333000

NEW DELHI: It's "walking away" from defeat, said senior Congress leader Salman Khurshid of Rahul Gandhi 's resignation as party president, and lamented that it cost the party the mandatory introspection which follows an election debacle.Speaking about the state of affairs in Congress after its decimation at the hands of BJP, Khurshid said, "We haven't really got together to analyse why we got defeated at the Lok Sabha polls. Our biggest problem is our leader has walked away."Rahul quit party presidency and said he was owning up moral responsibility for the defeat. But in doing so, he ignored repeated pleas from Congress leaders and workers that he stay on and steer the organisation.This is the first time that a Congress leader has used a strong term like "walking away" for Rahul's resignation, suggesting it was abdication on his part. Khurshid said Rahul's resignation had left a vacuum that had been made worse by the fact that Sonia Gandhi was treating her stepping in as a temporary arrangement."I did not want Rahul to resign. I wanted him to stay. I believe that workers wanted him to stay on and lead the party," Khurshid said, adding, "It is a sort of vacuum. Sonia Gandhi stepped in, but there is more than an indication that she is treating herself as a stop-gap arrangement. I wish it wasn't so."Salman Khurshid on Wednesday said that he will not quit the party."The kind of situation is prevailing in the nation and the kind of situation our party is in following the Lok Sabha elections... in these circumstances, some of us in Congress won't quit, we are an integral part of the Congress party (jee jaan se Congressi hain)," he told reporters on Wednesday."No matter what happens, we won't leave the party. We aren't like those who got everything from the party and when the chips were down, things were difficult they left the party and walked away," he added.Read this story in Marathi