The biggest organisational change made by Sonia, though anticipated in wake of discussions at the stormy Congress Working Committee meeting that was convened to discuss the letter by the 23 leaders last month, is the constitution of a six member “special committee to assist the Congress President in organisational and operational matters”. The committee constitutes Nehru-Gandhi family loyalists AK Antony, Ahmed Patel and Ambika Soni, along with KC Venugopal and Randeep Surjewala, both confidantes of former party chief Rahul Gandhi. It may be recalled that at the CWC meet held on August 24 to discuss the contents of the letter, Antony, Patel and Soni were among those members who had chastised the 23 colleagues who had demanded intra-party reforms. The lone member of this committee who was also a signatory to the pro-reform letter is party leader Mukul Wasnik, who has also managed to stay on as the party’s in-charge general secretary for Madhya Pradesh which is due for key by-elections next month. This panel will function till an AICC session is convened to elect a full-term president in accordance with the CWC resolution passed last month.
The biggest loser Friday’s exercise seemed to be party veteran and key Sonia aide of many years, Ghulam Nabi Azad who was seen as the main driving force behind the calls for reform. Azad, who was party general secretary in-charge of Haryana, has now been relieved of the charge. Though, he will continue to be the Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha for now, his term in Parliament’s Upper House ends in February next year. If speculations within the Congress are anything to go by, the mild-mannered former J&K chief minister who often served as Sonia’s emissary during talks with difficult Congress allies, like the DMK, in the past, is unlikely to be re-nominated to Rajya Sabha by his party.
Azad can, however, draw some solace from the fact that he has been retained as a member of the CWC but that is perhaps owing to his position as LoP in the Rajya Sabha and may not be a sign of any thaw in the distrust that the party seems to have developed against him since the letter episode. Similarly, his co-signatories to the letter – Anand Sharma and Mukul Wasnik and Jitin Prasada – have also managed to retain their place in the CWC.
The changes to the CWC – the apex decision making body of the Congress – have, however been largely cosmetic. Senior party leaders Motilal Vora, Luizinho Faleiro, Asha Kumari, and Tamradhwaj Sahu have been dropped. Rajya Sabha MP and former chief minister Digvijaya Singh, who had earlier been removed from the body to accommodate bête noir and now BJP member Jyotiraditya Scindia, makes a comeback as a permanent invitee. The list of permanent invitees to the CWC has also been expanded from the current strength of 15 to accommodate 25 leaders. The new inductees also include party veterans Salman Khurshid, Jairam Ramesh, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Avinash Pande, Pramod Tiwari, Pawan Kumar Bansal, Rajeev Shukla, Vivek Bansal, Devendra Yadav, Manish Chatrath, Manickam Tagore, Dinesh Gundu Rao and others.
The list of new party general secretaries and in-charges or of those who have been reassigned arouses little confidence about the Congress party’s sincerity in putting up a fight for its own survival, leave alone that of fighting the BJP. The revamp, however, has a clear stamp of Rahul Gandhi who is yet to give any firm indication of his willingness to return as party president; a post he had stepped down from following his party’s disastrous rout in last year’s Lok Sabha polls. In fact, when the 23 Congress leaders had sought organisational reform, one of their unstated concerns, as reported by Outlook, was Rahul’s “back-seat driving” of the party and his continued imprint on all intra-party appointments.
The revamp only strengthens this notion further. So, while Azad and scores of other party leaders – particularly the letter writers like Kapil Sibal, Veerappa Moily, Bhupinder Hooda, Prithviraj Chavan, Manish Tewari, Renuka Chowdhury, Vivek Tankha, Shashi Tharoor – have been left out of any key responsibility, leaders like Jitendra Singh, Rajani Patil, Shaktisinh Gohil, Rajeev Shukla, Dr. Chellakumar, Manish Chatrath, Bhakt Charan das and Kuljit Singh Nagra have either been retained or granted new roles.