Congress president Rahul Gandhi with mother Sonia Gandhi | Photo Credit: PTI

The core team of Congress strategists fed Rahul Gandhi the idea of Prime Ministership and misled him by claiming that the party would win 164-184 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, said a Sunday Guardian report. Rahul Gandhi's most-trusted aide Praveen Chakravarty and Divya Spandana are incommunicado since the day of general election results after allegedly charging huge sums of money in the name of research, the report further added.

According to the report, Rahul Gandhi contacted key UPA allies like Akhilesh Yadav, MK Stalin, Omar Abdullah, Sharad Pawar, etc and discussed the possibility of accommodating them in the next Cabinet. He dialled all these leaders after his team assured him that the Congress will easily secure somewhere between 164 to 184 Lok Sabha seats. The Congress president even procured two letters from a senior legal aide to enable the party to stake claim to form the government at the Centre. Rahul had planned grand celebrations outside the AICC office at 24, Akbar Road with some 10,000 supporters expected to attend it.

However, it turned out to be a huge dampener inside the party headquarters when the counting day showed a very contrary picture. Ever since that day, Praveen Chakravarty, who was looking after the election office and data analysis along with the running of the Shakti app, is out of the picture and out of contact. Reportedly, Chakravarty has not even provided the pre-election data to the party for which he charged over Rs 24 crore. His absence has led several senior party leaders to believe that he was working as a BJP mole inside the Congress headquarters, the report stated.

Another key team member who is incommunicado ever since the Lok Sabha election results is Divya Spandana. She is also said to have received Rs 8 crore for her research and social media drive during the electioneering phase. She is not just missing from the scene but she has also deleted both her Twitter and Instagram accounts.

It was not just Rahul Gandhi who fell for all the inaccurate predictions fed by his team but also his mother Sonia Gandhi and sister Priyanka Gandhi. The reports further claimed that after the drubbing in the elections, Rahul Gandhi now remains adamant on leaving the Congress leadership and hand it over to someone else to take on the BJP and its spearhead Narendra Modi.