Senior Congress leaders are scheduled to discuss the strategy to elect the new party chief at a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) on Friday. AICC sources said on the agenda of the CWC is also a discussion on the farmers’ agitation and the strategy for the Parliament’s Budget Session that begins on January 29.
The sources said that members of the CWC, which is the grand old party’s top decision-making body, are expected to discuss and finalise the schedule for organisational elections and the AICC plenary session as was decided in a meeting of senior leaders with the interim chief Sonia Gandhi last month. The CWC meeting will be chaired by Sonia Gandhi on a virtual mode.
“A tentative election schedule is ready but needs to be approved by the CWC before the party can complete the process of holding polls by February. Though a section of leaders has been pushing for former party chief Rahul Gandhi to take back the reins, there is no clarity on whether he will contest the elections,” a senior party leader said.
The CWC meeting has been convened following a report by the party’s Central Election Authority (CEA) led by Madhusudan Mistry who has suggested the basics for election to the full time Congress president’s post. Sonia had constituted a five-member CEA to conduct the internal polls in September last. Sonia took over as interim Congress president after Rahul Gandhi resigned in the wake of the party’s Lok Sabha debacle in May 2019 and then finally gave an ultimatum in August 2020 to elect the full time party president within six months.
There have been demands within the party for having a full-time party president and also an organisational overhaul as soon as possible. The CWC had in its earlier meeting in December decided to hold organisational elections after some top leaders expressed their restlessness in the party and in August they had also shot off a letter to Sonia Gandhi with the main crux that a complete overhaul of the party is urgently required. The leaders who had written to Sonia were a group of 23 senior leaders including Ghulam Nabi Azad, Anand Sharma, Kapil Sibal, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Prithviraj Chavan, Manish Tewari and Shashi Tharoor.
Sonia alongwith her son Rahul Gandhi and daughter Priyanka Gandhi, who is also a AICC General Secretary, had last month met some of the dissenters and had discussed the issues raised by them.
The elections for the Congress president took place last were in 2000 when Jitendra Prasada unsuccessfully contested against Sonia Gandhi and the last elections to the CWC took place in 1997 during Sitaram Kesri’s tenure as party chief. According to the party constitution, 12 of the 25 members have to be elected by delegates of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) while the rest are nominated by the president.