Congress top panel rejig: Kharge buries G23 ghost, brokers peace in Rajasthan
The 84-member Congress Working Committee has 39 CWC members (as per the amended Congress party constitution), the CWC consists of 36 nominees, both elected and nominated category members.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge finally managed to end the Rajasthan impasse by drafting Sachin Pilot in the Congress Working Committee (CWC).
Sachin is set to become AICC general secretary after the 2023 Rajasthan Assembly polls (likely to take place around November-December) unless the party upsets pollsters in staging a great comeback in the poll-bound state.
Sachin Pilot, in that scenario, would once again lobby to replace Ashok Gehlot as the chief minister of Rajasthan.
For the past many months, Kharge had been struggling to broker peace in Rajasthan where Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot was unwilling to appoint his bete noire as either state party chief or as deputy chief minister.
Sachin, in Kharge’s scheme of things, is seen as an asset whose utility spreads beyond Rajasthan. While Sachin was reportedly interested in a bigger role in the home state, Kharge, almost like a father figure, prevailed and urged him to consider a role outside Rajasthan.
The newly constituted CWC has also successfully buried the G23 factor in the grand old party.
Kharge has deftly brought in Shashi Tharoor, Anand Sharma, Mukul Wasnik, Veerappa Moily, Manish Tewari (Moily and Tewari have been made permanent invitees) and others who had signed a rather nasty letter to the then AICC interim president Sonia Gandhi questioning the leadership’s “inept" handling of the party.
Several leading lights of G23 namely Ghulam Nabi Azad and Kapil Sibal subsequently left the party while Tharoor had contested against Kharge for the AICC president’s post.
Kharge’s move to draft Tharoor in the CWC signals a healthy party culture where dissent is not held back against the nonconformist.
84-member body
The 84-member jumbo body has 39 CWC members (as per the amended Congress party constitution), the CWC consists of 36 nominees, both elected and nominated category members and former party chiefs like Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Kharge has accommodated 18 party leaders as permanent invitees, 14 in-charges of various states, departments and party functions, nine special invitees and four ex-office members i.e., NSUI, Youth Congress, Mahila Congress and Congress Sewa Dal heads.
Politically the only difference between the actual 39 CWC members and the rest is that others would cease to be members of the apex body the moment they are removed from their specific job.
In fact, some of the permanent invitees such as Harish Rawat, Pawan Bansal, Mohan Prakash, Deepender Singh Hooda, Manish Tewari and Tariq Hameed Karra are considered heavyweights and worthy to be full-fledged members of the CWC.
They would have been expecting their place in the original list of 39 CWC members.
Old guard and new face balance
In more substantial terms, Kharge has tried to strike a balance between the party’s old guard retaining Digvijaya Singh, P Chidambaram, AK Antony, Jairam Ramesh, Salman Khurshid, Ambika Soni, Meira Kumar, Tariq Anwar, etc, and bringing in new faces such as Sachin Pilot, Tamradhwaj Sahu, Charanjit Singh Channi, Raghu Veera Reddy, Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Kameshwar Patel, Syed Naseer Hussain, Gaurav Gogoi, MS Malviya and Jagdish Thakor.
One surprising omission from the list is Praveen Chakravarty, currently head of AICC’s data analytics department, considered to be close to Rahul Gandhi.
However, several party leaders perceived to be close to Rahul, namely Jitendra Singh, Randeep Singh Surjewala, KC Venugopal, Rajeev Shukla, Sachin Rao, K Raju, Dr Ajoy Kumar have been given their dues.
Some of these persons are already holding important positions in the party hierarchy.
