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Speculation about Cabinet, AICC reshuffle |
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There are reports that with the completion of three years of UPA, the Prime Minister may decide to give a new look to the Union Cabinet and Congress president Sonia Gandhi to AICC to prepare the party for the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. Observers say an exercise of this type may take place in the next few weeks after the presidential poll picture becomes clear. A new President has to be elected before July 24 when President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam completes his term.
Sweeping reforms in the Congress mooted
The Congress party organisation and constitution are set for sweeping reforms based on a report prepared by a panel headed by Pranab Mukherjee.
The panel has called for the scrapping of Congress committees at block, city and district levels and recommended that they be replaced with units at polling booths and Assembly and parliamentary constituencies.
The rationale for this change is to make the Congress more “election-friendly” and cut the tendency of district Congress committees being at loggerheads with the candidates contesting polls.
The new structure proposed by the panel is based on the British parliamentary model where a party’s candidates are selected by its local units.
At present, the Congress has a large but virtually defunct party organisation spread over 26 states.
While the Congress has four crore primary members, the party leadership has discovered that a substantial part of the membership is “bogus”. This was evident when Congress candidates in states such as Tamil Nadu, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh got lesser votes than the listed number of primary members.
Some other reforms under consideration are:
Selection of Assembly and parliamentary candidates at least six months before voting
A mechanism where the party guides key economic and social policies of the government (when the party is in power)
Mandatory meeting of AICC general secretaries twice a month (at present, these meetings are not held regularly)
No truck with communal forces and need to make conscious efforts to equate majority communalism with minority communalism
An annual brainstorming session on the lines of the Panchmarhi meet held in September 1998.
The panel - of which AICC general secretaries Janardhan Dwivedi and Digvijay Singh are two other important members - is likely to submit its final report by next month.
Apart from the Mukherjee panel’s report, Sonia has received recommendations from other senior AICC functionaries and party leaders. Almost all of them call for clarity on key agricultural issues, special economic zones and the need to formally draft Rahul Gandhi into the AICC secretariat.
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