The Congress party plans to hold its Working Committee (CWC) meeting at the historic Sardar Patel Bhavan at Ahmedabad next week, ahead of a meeting of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) , in a move ripe with significance. HT learns that the party hopes to use the meetings to announce a shift in organizational strategy that includes empowering its district level committees.
The decision to hold the CWC meeting at Sardar Patel Bhavan comes amid the party’s relentless effort to reclaim the legacy of the national icon from the Narendra Modi-led BJP which has successfully appropriated the legacy of not just Patel, but also Babasaheb Ambedkar and Subhas Chandra Bose.
“We wanted to hold the CWC meeting at Sardar Patel Bhavan as this year marks his 150th Birth anniversary and 75th death anniversary,” said a senior strategist who is involved in the preparations of the meetings. The CWC meeting is scheduled on April 8 followed by the AICC meeting on April 9.
Patel was a Congress stalwart, and the home minister who banned the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, but the BJP under Modi has often pointed out how he was robbed of the Prime Ministership and his alleged differences with Jawaharlal Nehru.
The Congress’ decision to meet in Gujarat itself is a signal that it wants to take the BJP head-on in the latter’s bastion. The BJP has been in power in Gujarat since 1998. To be sure, the Congress has fared poorly in electoral battles against the BJP, especially in North India, and especially in one-to-one contests as evident in the recent Lok Sabha and assembly elections.
The Congress top brass will also visit Mahatma Gandhi’s Sabarmati Ashram on April 8 evening.
Even as the drafting committee, which has met at least twice, is yet to finalize the agenda of the meeting, the Congress wants to inject a fresh lease of life into its district committees across the country.
Revitalizing district and booth level panels had been a decades-old agenda for the party; Lok Sabha’s Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi wants more empowerment for and more accountability from such committees.
According to the plan, the committees will be given more freedom to take decisions but will be tasked to conduct party programmes and agitate more vigorously. According to two senior leaders, they will also be involved in fund-raising and ensure that there are no unusual changes in the voters list. The party has repeatedly pointed to a sharp rise in the number of voters in Maharashtra between the Lok Sabha polls (in which the INDIA alliance led by it did well) and the assembly elections towards the end of the year in which the BJP-led alliance swept the polls. The Election Commission of India has said there was nothing untoward in the conduct of the elections.
Congress leaders said that the new experiment will DCCs will start with restructuring of these bodies in Gujarat and it will work as a model for rest of India. Rahul Gandhi is expected to meet with some DCC leaders on April 3.
Part of the plan for district level committees will also be to pick more candidates from them for Lok Sabha and assembly elections. “Their performance will be measured in concrete parameters. They play a very important part in the BJP’s organizational structure,” said a senior leader.
But another leader refused to admit that the party is trying to emulate the BJP’s organizational model and claimed that the party is merely expanding its Kerala model across India.
