Kharge's new CWC: Several hits, few misses

Ten months into his tenure as Congress president and six months after he was unanimously authorised by his party to nominate members to its highest decision-making body, Mallikarjun Kharge finally reconstituted the Congress Working Committee (CWC) on Sunday (August 20).

With a total of 84 members – 39 regular members, 32 permanent invitees and 13 special invitees – the bench strength of the CWC constituted by Kharge is the biggest that the Congress has ever seen.

The composition of the new CWC shows that Congress’s first ‘elected’ president in nearly a quarter of a century used the mandate given to him at the party’s 85th Plenary Session to simultaneously diversify social representation in his organisation’s apex body, signal his commitment to strengthening inner-party democracy and address electoral concerns even if he continued to grapple with crippling legacy issues of patronising organisational deadwood and sycophants.

Gandhi family loyalists

Since the Plenary Session had resolved to give permanent seats in the CWC to former prime ministers and presidents of the party, Dr. Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi were assured of a spot in the committee. Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who is touted to be relieved of her duties as party in-charge of Uttar Pradesh soon, has also been included making this the only time in the party’s history that a non-Gandhi party president will preside over a CWC that has three members from of the Nehru-Gandhi family.

What is expected to be critiqued about the reconstituted CWC, though, isn’t so much the inclusion of the Gandhi troika but, arguably and not without merit, Kharge’s inability to rid the party’s apex body of several Gandhi family loyalists who have continued to be rewarded organisationally despite either their diminishing utility in the party or their repeatedly proven incompetence in handling any task assigned to them.

How CWC’s deliberations or the party’s decision-making would be enhanced with the continuing inclusion or reinstatement of members such as Ambika Soni, Anand Sharma, Salman Khurshid, Jitendra Singh, Deepak Babaria, Avinash Pande (all regular members), Harish Rawat, Mohan Prakash, BK Hariprasad, Harish Chaudhary, Bhakta Charan Das and Rajeev Shukla (all permanent invitees) is a mystery given that most of these leaders, besides being drumbeaters of one or the other member of the Gandhi family, have had no organisational or electoral triumph to their credit in years.

To be fair to Kharge, though, it would have been nearly impossible for him to have ejected several of these members from the CWC given that the Grand Old Party, through the years it was steered by Sonia, and later, by Rahul, had made these leaders synonymous with its central leadership. Besides, the Congress has repeatedly jabbed the BJP for not respecting the stalwarts who built the saffron party and so Kharge wouldn’t have wanted to attract the same taint by benching members like AK Antony or Ambika Soni, despite these leaders reportedly offering to stay out.

By reinstating almost 80 per cent of members of the last CWC into the reconstituted one, almost all of them Gandhi family loyalists, Kharge has signalled that he has no intention to downsize the influence of the party’s first family on the Congress’s functioning – a stark contrast to earlier non-Gandhi presidents such as PV Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri, who were scorched by their colleagues for doing so the moment Sonia decided to enter politics in 1998.

The Raipur Plenary had approved the expansion of the CWC from its previous strength of 24 members to 35 members (excluding the present and former party chiefs and former PMs). It is the additional manoeuvring space provided to him where Kharge has deftly shown his skills at applying the correctives that the Congress had been desperately in need of.

Of course, it would always be said that Kharge wouldn’t have finalised the blueprint for his CWC without inputs from the Gandhis – and their imprint is undeniable – nor would he have had the chance to achieve what he has, had the party’s collective leadership at the Raipur Plenary not given him the instruments to do so. Yet, Kharge deserves credit for his willingness to walk the party’s talk on enhancing to 50 per cent the representation of youth, women, scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and minorities in the CWC.

'Youth quota'

Though Kharge was getting pilloried for his failure to keep the party’s promise of granting 50 per cent seats in the CWC to leaders aged below 50 years, this criticism is based on an incorrect reading of the Congress’s resolution. There is no denying that the Congress, at its 2022 Udaipur Nav Sankalp Chintan Shivir, had approved a ’50 below 50’ resolution to suggest that leaders aged below 50 years would get half the spots in all organisational posts. However, the amendments made to the Congress constitution at the Raipur Plenary had tweaked the Udaipur promise and provisioned for a 50 per cent quota in the CWC for youth, women, SCs, STs, OBCs and religious minorities.

On this score, Kharge has fulfilled the mandate granted to him in Raipur. As such, though only three regular members of CWC – Sachin Pilot, Gourav Gogoi and Kamleshwar Patel – may be from the ‘youth quota’ of leaders aged under 50 years, the total number of regular members who come from the umbrella quota for youth, women, SCs, STs, OBCs and minorities is 20 out of 39. Kharge has also ensured that compared to all previous CWCs, women get a larger share even among permanent and special invitees. Of the 84 members of the extended CWC, 15 are women. These include Sonia Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, Ambika Soni, Meira Kumar, Kumari Selja, Deepa Das Munshi (all regular members), Pratibha Singh, Meenakshi Natarajan, Phulo Devi Netam, Rajani Patil (all permanent invitees), Yashomati Thakur, Supriya Shrinate, Praniti Shinde and Alka Lamba (all special invitees), along with Netta D’souza, who, as chief of the Mahila Congress, is an ex-officio member of the CWC.

What is, however, more laudable is that while enhancing social diversity in the party, Kharge hasn’t merely opted for the same lot of leaders who have been rotationally rewarded with such posts as if the CWC was merely a venue for musical chairs. Instead, he has sourced leaders from state-level and grassroots politics, including MLAs or former MLAs, rather than opting singularly for the highbrow Congress elite rooted in perpetuity in Lutyens' Delhi. Additionally, in doing so, Kharge has also adroitly kept the party’s electoral considerations in mind.

Mahendrajeet Malviya, a tribal MLA from Rajasthan, Kamleshwar Patel, a backward caste MLA from Madhya Pradesh, N. Raghuveera Reddy, a backward caste former MLA from Andhra Pradesh, former MP Meenakshi Natarajan, Damodar Raja Narasimha, a Dalit leader and former deputy CM of undivided Andhra, former Uttarakhand Congress chief Ganesh Godiyal, former Goa Congress chief Girish Chodankar, among several others, may not be known names in national politics, nor are they the sort of suave leaders that the national media constantly projects as ‘leaders of tomorrow’. That Kharge has sought it fit to give these leaders a place at the high table of the CWC, alongside party stalwarts, signals a democratisation of the CWC.

Kharge's another ominous task

Similarly, Kharge deserves credit for including his rival in the Congress’s presidential election, Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor, as a regular member of the CWC. Tharoor’s inclusion is meant to signal Kharge’s faith in inner-party democracy. It also shows that Kharge, who Tharoor had during the Congress presidential election campaign targeted for representing status quo instead of reform, can look past jibes directed at him from his colleagues when it is in the party’s interest.

The inclusion of Sachin Pilot, Pratibha Singh and Tamradhwaj Sahu or even Veerappa Moily and BK Hariprasad also signals that though Congress chief ministers in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka may enjoy the full confidence of the party high command, they will be subjected to checks on their authority, at least within the party organisation. Pilot’s rebellion against Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot and the uneasy truce between the two is well-known.

Singh was a key challenger for the CM’s post when the party picked Sukhwinder Sukhu to lead its Himachal government while Sahu, an influential backward caste leader from Chhattisgarh, has been an intra-party rival of Chhattisgarh CM Bhupesh Baghel. Similarly, both Moily and Hariprasad had stridently opposed Siddaramaiah’s appointment as Karnataka CM when the Congress romped to power in the state earlier this year.

By including all these leaders in the CWC, Kharge has sought to fell two birds with one stone – it indicates to the CMs that in organisational matters the high command won’t rely solely on their word and to the CWC inductees, their spot at the party’s high table is an assurance that their value for the party isn’t lost on the president.

With the CWC constituted, Kharge now has to ensure that those freshly inducted, particularly under the 50 per cent quota, do not merely serve an ornamental purpose in the party’s decision-making process. New members such as Tharoor, Pilot, Pawan Khera, Kanhaiya Kumar, Lamba, Raghuveera Reddy, K. Raju, Narasimha, Sudeep Roy Burman, among others, may have a fresh perspective to offer on the often predictable path that the Congress chooses to take in crucial matters. Kharge will be tested on his ability to not just let such members speak their mind at CWC meetings, the first of which may be convened within a few weeks, but to also accept their suggestions when in the interest of the party even if the entrenched stalwarts on the committee do not agree.

The working of the new CWC aside, Kharge also has another ominous task at hand. Several of the party’s state units are either without an in-charge or have in-charges against whom the local leadership has repeatedly expressed no confidence. A revamp of the AICC has been long due and will afford Kharge another chance to reform the party’s functioning ahead of next year’s Lok Sabha polls.