Tribune News Service

New Delhi, July 18

Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Sunday chaired a virtual meeting of party’s Lok Sabha MPs and decided to raise farmers’ issues, Covid vaccination and response, fuel price rise and Rafale deal ‘corruption’ on priority in the monsoon session starting tomorrow.

The Congress, however, decided to meet ahead of the session tomorrow morning to take a call on the preference for Monday and may flag the much anticipated phone-tapping scam should it come to light by then. “The list of preferences of items to be taken up has been kept on the hold in the wake of reports of alleged phone tapping of several important persons in India by an Israel firm. If the reports are true, it would be a major issue of concern tomorrow,” said a Congress MP.

Earlier in the day, Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge held a meeting with other Opposition party leaders of the upper house – NCP’s Sharad Pawar, TMC’s Derek O Brien, DMK’s Tiruchi Siva, Shiv Sena’s Sanjay Raut, leaders of the CPI and CPM; Congress’ Anand Sharma and Jairam Ramesh.

The meeting decided that the Opposition would work jointly in Parliament to raise inflation, fuel price rise issue, Covid response of the government, farmers’ agitation issue

Panel recast: Adhir stays LS leader

New Delhi: Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Sunday reconstituted the parliamentary groups retaining Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury as the leader of the party in Lok Sabha and keeping MPs Manish Tewari and Shashi Tharoor in the LS strategy group. The LS group also consists of House deputy leader Gaurav Gogoi, chief whip K Suresh, and whips Ludhiana MP Ravneet Bittu and Manickam Tagore. The Rajya Sabha group will consist of Leader of Opposition Mallikarjun Kharge, deputy leader Anand Sharma, chief whip Jairam Ramesh, Ambika Soni (who replaces late Ahmed Patel), P Chidambaram, Digvijay Singh and KC Venugopal. TNS