Delhi Elections : Congress sets up panel to revitalise Congress
After the 1999 polls, when the Congress won just 114 seats in the Lok Sabha putting up its worst performance in a general election up to that date, its chief Sonia Gandhi announced a committee to look into the drubbing headed by AK Antony. Almost a decade later, Ms Gandhi, now more experienced, decided not to wait for 2009 general election verdict to set up another committee.
The Congress Working Committee, meeting a week after the party’s defeat in Karnataka, decided to set up a new panel to help it overcome the slump of successive assembly election defeats. The party announced on Wednesday that this too will be headed by Mr Antony.
The leader, who is the Union defence Minster now, had 10 other Congressmen for help in 1999, of which two, namely Mani Shankar Aiyyar, PR Dasmunsi, have been repeated in the 2008 panel. The rest of the current team also made-up of experienced members — AICC general secretaries Digvijay Singh and Mukul Wasnik, Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad and Congress Working Committee (CWC) member Urmila Singh — and the new committee should not find it hard to meet the 15-day deadline set for it by the Congress high command.
The meeting, which took place exactly a week after the party’s debacle in Karnataka, saw the CWC asserting that the party has the “capacity to draw correct lessons from temporary electoral defeats and re-energise itself to meet emerging challenges.”
Assembly elections in a series of states are scheduled this year followed by that of the Lok Sabha early next year.
With the Congress losing elections in as many as 13 states since it came to power in the Centre in May 2004, the CWC had urged all partymen to work as a “unified, cohesive and motivated team so that we are successful in the campaigns that lie ahead.”
This group has Congress scion Rahul Gandhi as one of its members and the report has his suggestions on fostering greater inner-party democracy.
With the party having seen many committee reports in the last decade since Ms Gandhi took over, doubts about what another set of proposals can do to help the party are bound to crop up. The Congress leadership might thus need to do more than setting up committees to bring enthusiasm back to the party ahead of the 2009 elections.
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