In a major development, 23 senior leaders of the Indian National Congress (INC) have in an unprecedented manner written a letter to the incumbent party president Sonia Gandhi seeking sweeping changes in the way the party is to be run, reports Indian Express.

The 23 senior leaders include five former chief ministers (CMs), several sitting Members of Parliament (MPs), former union ministers and also several incumbent members of the Congress Working Committee (CWC). They underscored the "drift" in the party as something that had left its workers demoralised, weakening the party.

The letter is believed to have been written to Gandhi almost a fortnight ago, and it acknowledged the rise of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The letter admitted that the youth of the nation decisively backed Prime Minister (PM), Narendra Modi, in the two general elections and that the Congress was losing the confidence of the youth.

In the letter, 23 leaders have demanded a "full time and effective leadership" which is not only "visible", but also "active" in the field. They have also called for the establishment of an "institutional leadership mechanism" to "collectively" guide the party's yearning for a resurgence.

The signatories to the letter include Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad; party MPs and former union ministers Anand Sharma, Kapil Sibal, Manish Tewari, Shashi Tharoor; MP Vivek Tankha; AICC office bearers and CWC members including Mukul Wasnik and Jitin Prasada and former Chief Ministers and Union Ministers including Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Rajender Kaur Bhattal, M Veerappa Moily, Prithviraj Chavan, P J Kurian, Ajay Singh, Renuka Chaudhary, and Milind Deora; former PCC chiefs Raj Babbar (UP), Arvinder Singh Lovely (Delhi) and Kaul Singh Thakur (Himachal); current Bihar campaign chief Akhilesh Prasad Singh, former Haryana Speaker Kuldeep Sharma; former Delhi Speaker Yoganand Shastri and former MP Sandeep Dixit.