AICC panels push to more than double quota in party units

Many members of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) panels which are preparing the draft proposals to be placed before the party's Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session) in Udaipur next week are pushing for major organisational reforms and significant enhancement of the reservation quota for the socially backward sections in the party structure, according to people aware of the matter.

These proposals are subject to consensus within the panels, and clearance of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) and Chintan Shivar, they said.

As these panels worked late on Saturday to finalise their draft proposals for the perusal of Monday's pre-Chintan Shivir CWC meeting, many members of the AICC's social and empowerment committee are learnt to have pushed to enhance the quota for other backward communities, scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and minorities in the party to 50% or more from the existing 20%.


The enhanced quota should be applicable from the block level to the AICC, Pradesh Congress Committees and preferably the CWC as well, they argued, saying higher quota is essential to make the Congress organisation truly reflect the social arithmetic of the population, besides giving each of the four segments their rightful representation.

The move is also inspired by the party's need for careful electoral positioning in view of the "social justice" plank of the regional parties and the BJP's "Hindu" plank. The Congress already has a 33% quota for women. Digvijaya Singh, Kumari Selja, Meira Kumar, K Raju, SS Randhawa are among the members of the panel headed by Salman Khurshid.

Organisational reforms
The committee on organisational matters is learnt to have proposed reforms, restructuring and removal of “excess baggage” in many organisational posts. Among the proposals pushed by its members are to end the practice of constituting mega panels of office-bearers, both in the AICC and in the PCCs, by fixing constitutional caps on the permissible numbers. Accordingly, the current 100-plus posts of the AICC secretaries can be brought down to just 30 and that of the current humongous panels of PCCs to 50 in smaller states and 100 in other states, as per the suggestions made by some members of the panel which has among others Ramesh Chennithala, Tariq Anwar, Ajay Maken as members and Mukul Wasnik as its head.

There is also a proposal of empowering the leadership of PCCs to appoint the presidents of the district congress committee (DCCs) in place of the AICC leadership nominating them.