Arjun-George shadow over organisational polls

While PCC members directly elect the Congress president, the AICC delegates choose a part of the crucial Congress Working Committee (CWC).

Party sources point to the links of the PROs with either Arjun Singh or Vincent George, especially in the bigger states. These states are crucial since they account for a substantial number of PCC and AICC members.

The PRO of Uttar Pradesh, Birendra Singh, a former PCC chief of Haryana, is a trusted Arjun aide dating back to the time when both were together in Congress (Tiwari). Birendra’s counterpart in Bihar is Gopinath Dikshit, a former UP minister and another loyal Congress (Tiwari) hand. Pulled out from relative obscurity, his proximity to N D Tiwari and Arjun Singh is well-known in the party.

Being the largest state, UP’s importance can be gauged from the fact that it alone sends as many as 1400 of the approximate 6,000 PCC delegates and 161 of around 900 AICC members. And taken together with Bihar, the two states account for almost 20 per cent of the total PCC and AICC members.

It’s not just the appointment of PROs in UP and Bihar that has raised eyebrows in party circles. Former Union Minister P J Kurien is the party’s election officer for Maharashtra while another former Union minister and party MP from Punjab, R L Bhatia, is in-charge of Orissa. Both Kurien and Bhatia are known to be old 10 Janpath loyalists and are said to be close to both George and Arjun.

What has further disturbed Congress circles is that for a party with an all-India presence, there is an unusually large number of leaders from Kerala as PROs. Karnataka has senior Kerala leader Vakkom Purushottaman as the PRO while Kerala’s former United Democratic Front (UDF) convenor E Sankaranarayanan is in charge in Tamil Nadu. In Madhya Pradesh, the PRO is former Rajya Sabha MP from Kerala, Vyalar Ravi, while in Tripura another former MP from Kerala, P C Chacko, has been assigned the task.

The Kerala connection, assert party sources, points clearly to the hand of the all-powerful George, working in tandem with trusted party leaders to ensure that no upsets take place, especially in the elections for the CWC.

Curiously enough, there is no criteria for the appointment of PROs although this time they were to be chosen in consultation with the party’s Central Election Authority (CEA) chairman Ram Niwas Mirdha.

The silent backroom manouevring has put a question mark on the polls as senior party leaders feel this has been done to ensure that only those nominees who have the approval of 10 Janpath will find themselves in the CWC. “The fight is not for the Congress chief’s post…it’s for the crucial CWC berths to be decided by the AICC delegates,” says a senior party leader.