NEW DELHI: Congress President Rahul Gandhi’s grand plan for the party’s two-day plenary session beginning here on Saturday stands tattered. He wanted the grassroot loyalist workers from the party’s block-level committees to dominate and speak while the AICC members and the PCC delegates listen to them for a change.
Those given the responsibility to let the state Congress chiefs identify such workers who have been always with the party and get them to the plenary, however, floundered, sabotaging the very idea of Rahul to make it what party chief spokesman Randeep Singh Surjewala described as a “workers’ plenary.” Rahul wanted to hear the voice from the grassroots from across the country to shun his criticism for giving importance and promoting outsiders, ignoring the loyal party workers.
The Congress plenary is attended by AICC members and PCC (Pradesh Congress Committee) delegates but it was decided for the first time to send invitations to loyal party workers who fail to get into these two categories. The AICC general secretaries and the state in-charges were asked to get their name, but either they did not take any interest or sent the lists of senior leaders and district presidents instead of the ordinary workers.
The general secretaries who did not take any interest included C P Joshi, who was supposed to get names from Bihar, West Bengal and whole of the Northeast under him, Mohan Prakash and Digvijaya Singh, who is on the round-the-Narmada walk in Madhya Pradesh and not even attending the plenary.
Instructions were issued by Rahul to ensure that this becomes a “workers’ plenary” in all intents and purposes and so the usual suspects who spoke on every platform for decades should be excluded and newer faces should be encouraged. If there are 50 speakers at the plenary over the next two days, 40 were supposed to be the new leaders, mostly in the age group of 30 to 50 or those who are with the Congress forever. The entrenched forces who dominated the deliberations for decades were supposed to listen to the new voices.
However, Rahul’s core team found only the well-known names of the leaders who are always there in the AICC sessions and not the ordinary party workers when the exercise began for issuing the passes for the plenary. As per
Forget about the passes to be issued to the ordinary workers, a large number of the legitimate AICC members and PCC delegates from most of the states have not been informed though they have already arrived here on their own, taking rounds of the AICC headquarters as desks set up there still do not have the certified lists from the party’s central election authority chief Mullappally Ramachandran, be it the case of Maharashtra, Gujarat, Bihar and many other states.
In fact, even Rahul’s election as the party president last December was carried out without publishing the valid voters’ list, a party insider said, wondering how Mullappally scrutinised the nomination papers and declared Rahul elected unopposed. The plenary is to ratify his election.
Though Surjewala on Thursday emphatically ruled out Sonia Gandhi speaking at the plenary but only attending it since she has already relinquished the post of the Congress President, a top party source said she will be speaking on Saturday, apart from Rahul’s opening and closing remarks. She may speak when the political resolution is taken up, he said.
Another major change effected this time is to discard Delhi unit of the party as the hosts despite the party constitution clearly laying down that the state unit of the party will be the hosts in making all arrangements. Instead, the party has engaged professional agencies and contractors to make all arrangements.
Though Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee has formed a reception committee to look after the logistics, the event will be organised by a 22-member organising committee headed by treasurer Motilal Vora(89), with all 14 general secretaries and six state in-charges as its members. Delhi Congress chief Ajay Maken is there as also former Delhi CM Sheila Dikshit and Ahmed Patel are there just as the special invitees.
