NEW DELHI, Feb. 8 (Xinhua) -- India's opposition leader Sonia Gandhi Thursday asked all the parliamentarians of the Congress party to be loyal to her son Rahul, who took over the reins from her in December last year.

"He is now my boss too, let there be no doubt about that, and I know that all of you will work with him with the same dedication, loyalty and enthusiasm as you did with me," Gandhi told Congress MPs in a meeting at the Parliament.

The 71-year-old Italy-born politician, who handed over the reins of Congress to Nehru-Gandhi scion Rahul in December last year after being at the helm for over 19 years, also said that she was confident that the party's fortune would revive under Rahul's leadership.

Sonia Gandhi, the widow of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, has been of late being unwell and was hospitalised a number of times in the past three years. In 2011, she went to the U.S. to receive surgery for an undisclosed medical condition.

Sonia Gandhi is the head of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which governed India for most of the time since independence from colonial Britain in 1947. Her party lost the 2014 general elections to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.