Jaipur, January 18
Congress president Sonia Gandhi today told party leaders that there was a need to recognise aspirations of the “new changing India” and deliver on that front.

Around 350 delegates heard Sonia Gandhi weave a broad tapestry of major issues, including women empowerment, emerging political and socio-economic challenges, at the two-day Chintan Shivir that began at the Birla auditorium here today. “We have to recognise the new changing India, an India increasingly peopled by a younger, more aspirational, more impatient, more demanding and better educated generation …Our youth is getting more assertive, it wants its voice to be heard,” she said after inaugurating the third brainstorming exercise of the party since she assumed leadership in 1998. There had been a demographical shift of electorate in favour of the young, she said.

Talking about similar sessions held earlier at Pachmarhi (1998) and Shimla (2003), she said those sessions were held when the Congress was in the Opposition at the Centre. The current exercise should bring to fore the experience of leading a coalition government at the Centre for the last nine years, she said.

She said the recent public demonstrations, be it the Anna Hazare movement or protests after the Delhi gang rape, by the young and educated sections of society had hit the party and the government alike. She said the people now expected much more from parties.

“Aided by tools of the modern world - television, social media, mobile phones and the Internet - today’s India is better informed and better equipped to communicate,” she said. Claiming credit for making laws like the Right to Information Act, she said such legislations had given people “the ability to seek more from their elected representatives”.

She said the citizens were rightly fed up with the level of corruption in higher echelons. “We cannot allow our growing educated and middle-classes to be disillusioned and alienated from the political process,” she added. On the experience of sharing power in states, she said a balance needed to be struck between alliance compulsions.