CONGRESS DROPS DISSENTERS
New Delhi, Sept. 11: Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Friday dropped Ghulam Nabi Azad and Ambika Soni, as AICC general secretaries, but retained them in the crucial CWC.
The Congress on Friday went in for a major overhaul of the party’s organisation structure. Many old timers retained their prominent positions in the working committee while General Secretaries of the party were shuffled around with new comers outnumbering the incumbents. Senior leaders Mr. Ghulam Nabi Azad and Ambika Soni were dropped as General Secretaries but found a place in the working committee.
In a bid to divide the ‘dissenters’ who were signatories to the letter to Congress President Sonia Gandhi, several of them found important positions in the organisational structure. These include Mr. Mukul Wasnik who has been accommodated as General Secretary Incharge of Madhya Pradesh, member of the working committee and also of the special committee to assist the Congress President.
Ghulam Nabi Azad has been kept in the working committee along with Jitin Prasada who is also in CWC and incharge of West Bengal. Anand Sharma has also been retained in the working committee.
While the other writers of the letter like Kapil Sibal, Prithviraj Chauhan, Shashi Tharoor, Milind Deora, Sandeep Dikshit, Veerappa Moily and Bhupinder Singh Hooda have been left out.
Even Deependra Hooda has been dropped from the working committee.
The reshuffle bears an imprint of Mr. Rahul Gandhi.
Leaders like Randeep Surjewala, Rajeev Satav, K.C. Venugopal, Vivek Bansal, Manickam Tagore have been given prominent states or a place in the working committee.
The biggest gainers in this reshuffle include Randeep Surjewala, K.C. Venugopal, Dinesh Gundurao.
Surjewala is a General Secretary, Communications Incharge, Incharge of state, Working committee member and member of the special committee.
New members of the Congress Working Committee are Digvijay Singh, Rajiv Shukla, Manickam Tagore, Pramod Tiwari, Jairam Ramesh, H.K. Patil, Salman Khurshid, Pawan Bansal, Dinesh Gundurao, Manish Chatrath and Kuljit Nagra.
Apart from Azad, Ambika Soni, Motilal Vora and Mallikarjun Kharge have also been removed from their posts of general secretaries. However, Soni has been included in the special committee formed to assist Sonia Gandhi in organisational matters.
The special committee members include A.K. Antony, Ahmed Patel, K.C. Venugopal and Mukul Wasnik, apart from Ambika Soni and Randeep Surjewala.
The reshuffle comes a month after a group of 23 party leaders wrote a letter to Sonia Gandhi calling for an overhaul of the party, internal elections and a “full-time, visible leadership”.