After Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991 and Sonia Gandhi refused to succeed him as the Congress president, the party settled on the choice of P. V. Narasimha Rao who subsequently became Prime Minister after winning elections that year. Over the next few years, however, the Congress fortunes continued to dwindle and it lost the 1996 elections. Several senior leaders such as Madhavrao Sindhia, Rajesh Pilot, Narayan Dutt Tiwari, Arjun Singh, Mamata Banerjee, G. K. Moopanar, P. Chidambaram and Jayanthi Natarajan were in open revolt against incumbent President Sitaram Kesri and many of whom quit the party, splitting the Congress into many factions.