New Delhi: Ahead of the Congress  Working Committee (CWC) meet on Monday,  23 senior  Congress leaders, including five former chief ministers, sitting MPs Shashi Tharoor and Manish Tiwari, members of Congress Working Committee and over a dozen former union ministers, have written a letter to party chief Sonia Gandhi, asking her to make “sweeping changes” in the party and stop its “steady decline”.

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The senior party leaders have said they are unhappy with "uncertainty" and "drift" in the party. The letter calls for an "honest introspection", "collective leadership", and stresses that the "youth are losing confidence" in the party.

According to a report in The Indian Express, the letter points at the rise of the BJP and admits that people unfalteringly voted for Narendra Modi. T then expresses worry over the mammoth erosion of the support base of the Congress and calls for an urgent need for “full time and effective leadership”, decentralization of power, elections within the Congress at all levels, and empowerment of state units.

While the leaders have refrained from naming Rahul Gandhi directly in the letter, they insist that the introduction of elections in Youth Congress and NSUI has lead to “conflict and division”.

The signatories to the letter include party MPs and former Union Ministers Anand Sharma, Kapil Sibal, Manish Tewari, Shashi Tharoor, MP Vivek Tankha, AICC and CWC members Jitin Prasada and Mukul Wasnik, Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, former chief ministers and union ministers Bhupinder Singh Hooda, M Veerappa Moily, Rajender Kaur Bhattal, Prithviraj Chavan, P J Kurian, 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.

On Monday, the Congress had rubbished a tweet by Sanjay Jha that said some 100 Congress leaders have written to Sonia Gandhi asking for a change in the political leadership. Jha was sacked as spokesperson of the Congress last month after he publicly criticized the party in the turmoil over Sachin Pilot's revolt, which plunged the Rajasthan government into crisis.

The Congress alleged that the "non-existent letter" was an attempt to divert attention from the Facebook controversy and was being circulated by "BJP stooges".