New Delhi, Mar 7 (IANS): Ahead of the second leg of the budget session, Congress parliamentary party chairman Sonia Gandhi chaired a virtual meeting of the party leaders on Sunday.

In the meeting, the members of G-23 Anand Sharma and Manish Tewari joined in along with newly appointed Leader of opposition in Rajya Sabha, Mallikarjun Kharge and Adhir Ranjan Chaudhary who is the floor leader in the Lok Sabha.

Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, AK Antony and Jairam Ramesh also attended the meeting in which the Congress discussed the strategy to counter the government on key issues such as farmers' agitation, petroleum prices and unemployment.

On Sunday, former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi also targeted the government on farm laws and tweeted: "Livelihood is right not favour, PM Modi, please give MSP."

Recently Sonia Gandhi had targeted the government over the disinvestment of PSU by the government. In an article, she wrote: "The Modi government is using the economy's collapse since the pandemic to rush headlong into its mission of handing over large portions of India's wealth to its favourite crony capitalists. It has announced its intent to become cash rich by selling the family silver, through hasty privatisation of India's public sector undertakings (PSUs)."

She said the Modi government has explicitly embraced "privatisation", instead of "disinvestment".

On the issue of newly floated social media rules, the Congress has demanded answers from the government.

Congress Spokesperson Supriya Shrinate said: "It is absolutely certain that at the time of corona, when the entire world including all of us were standing rock solid with the Government and hoping that the Prime Minister is thinking about our lives, our livelihood, he was thinking about how to sort out this crisis, he was actually preparing to stab us in the back by first compromising with the freedom of speech and expression in the country by first controlling free press."