"The party is run by some babus and security personnel," said a leader
After the Congress's decimation in the latest round of elections, more and more party leaders are calling for a complete overhaul and a leadership change - a demand that was so far confined to the "G-23" or group of 23 "dissenters" who had written to Sonia Gandhi two years ago.
The Congress yesterday lost Punjab, one of the last big states in its control, to the eight-year-old Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and failed to put up a credible fight in three states where it had a shot at a comeback - Uttarakhand, Goa and Manipur.
The party now has just two states (Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh), similar to AAP.
Later this year, the Congress faces another giant test, one that could decide its future as the main opposition.
If the Congress does not perform well in the Gujarat and Karnataka election, it could lose its leader of opposition status in the Rajya Sabha, just like in the Lok Sabha, where it fell short of the numbers required to qualify for the post.
"There will be no course correction," said senior Congress leaders, who are speaking out within the party against the Gandhis' leadership but do not want to come on record.
"It's too late" for the Congress, these leaders say, adding that this was a disaster foretold many times over.
Congress leaders in Delhi are questioning decisions by Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra that, they say, put the party in auto-destruct mode in Punjab.
Congress troubleshooter DK Shivakumar told NDTV: "It is impossible for the Congress to survive without the Gandhi family. Those who are hungry for power can please leave. The rest of us are not interested in power and will stay with the Gandhi family." But Gandhi loyalists like him are a depleting force in the party after serial defeats.
After months of infighting, the unravelling of the Congress in Punjab was hastened by the replacement of Amarinder Singh as Chief Minister just four months before elections. Navjot Singh Sidhu, who forced the move, continued the feud with Amarinder Singh's successor Charanjit Singh Channi.
"How could senior leaders like KC Venugopal allow the Sidhu episode and enable such a disaster? It's a systemic failure and a collapse of the system," said a Congress leader.
Priyanka Gandhi's campaign in Uttar Pradesh, pushing the "ladki hoon, lad sakti hoon (I'm a woman, I can fight)" slogan, also flopped.
"In UP, we have got a lower percentage of votes than last time. We don't need a weather forecast to see what is happening," the leader said.
Veteran Congress leaders said "hundreds of crores were spent for the election", with event managers organising marathons (to promote the women-first campaign in UP) and equipment.
"Yet no votes materialized from all this. In one state, they gave women 40% of the seats and in another, just 4%,"one leader said.
After the Bihar election debacle in 2020 and last year's state election results, the Congress leadership went into "introspection" mode and formed a committee to recommend corrective steps. But leaders claimed that the findings of the committee were "never seen" and not even shared with members of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party's highest decision-making body.
"We are speaking out of anguish, not anger. We were never consulted or allowed to be involved in the election decisions," a senior leader told NDTV.
"The party is run by some babus and security personnel," he raged.
Over the past two years, the Congress' internal churn over back-to-back election defeats has been amplified by the exit of senior party leaders, most of them close to Rahul Gandhi.
In 2020, Jyotiraditya Scindia switched to the BJP, taking away a chunk of MLAs in Madhya Pradesh and bringing down the Congress government in the state.
Months later, 23 Congress leaders wrote to Sonia Gandhi calling for sweeping organizational reforms, a "full-time and visible leadership" and collective decision-making. The letter bombshell led to a meeting in which two of the letter-writers were ambushed by Gandhi loyalists. Not much changed.
Last year, prominent UP leader Jitin Prasada crossed over to the BJP and this year, two more leaders, former union ministers RPN Singh and Ashwani Kumar, left the Congress.
RPN Singh was the third member of Rahul Gandhi's close circle to join the BJP, after Mr Scindia and Mr Prasada.
"What has happened to all their blue eyed boys? They have left the party. We have not left and remained in the party," a Congress leader seethed.
"The demands we had made in 2020 , much water has flown since then and those demands may not be relevant in the present situation," he added.
Party leaders, describing what they called disarray, said members in the CWC were almost outnumbered by "special invitees".
Both the Gandhis acknowledged the drubbing on Twitter.
"Humbly accept the people's verdict... We will learn from this and keep working for the interests of the people of India," Rahul Gandhi wrote on Twitter.
Priyanka Gandhi said party workers and leaders had worked hard but failed to convert it into votes.
Shashi Tharoor, a member of the G-23, however, tweeted that change is unavoidable.
"All of us who believe in Congress are hurting from the results of the recent assembly elections. It is time to reaffirm the idea of India that the Congress has stood for and the positive agenda it offers the nation. And to reform our organisational leadership in a manner that will reignite those ideas and inspire the people. One thing is clear - Change is unavoidable if we need to succeed," Mr Tharoor said.