Kesri forced to retreat

Reluctantly Kesri shelved his grand plan of getting the Steering Committee to authorise him to nominate the next CWC. He gave the green signal in the first session of the Congress plenary following which the election schedule was announced. By the evening, 62 candidates were in the fray and have time till tomorrow noon to withdraw.

Papers of 17 candidatures were found invalid and 62 remained in the list released by returning officer Oscar Fernandes at 7.15 pm. Some more are expected to withdraw tomorrow and the election, if necessary, will be between 3.30 and 6 pm. Ten of the 20 CWC members are to be elected and an equal number are nominated by the party president.

Several senior party leaders have filed their papers for the poll. Some of them are: Jitendra Prasada, Vijaya Bhaskara Reddy, Pranab Mukherjee, R K Dhawan, Rajesh Pilot, N D Tiwari, Arjun Singh, A R Antulay, Sharad Pawar, Sunil Dutt, Sushil Kumar Shinde, V N Gadgil, Madhavrao Scindia, Matang Singh, Balram Jakhar, G Venkatswamy, C K Jaffer Sharief, V C Shukla, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Janardhana Poojary, Santosh Mohan Deb and Tariq Anwar.

Some noteable absentees are K Karunakaran, A K Antony and Meira Kumar. The important factor in the list of candidates is that a fair number are said to be close to Kesri implying that they could have been nominated by the party president.

There are two ways of looking at this: either nobody is sure of being nominated by Kesri, considering he can take his time over it, or they have been instructed by Kesri to stay in the poll and reduce the chances of people inimical to him being elected.

But the very fact that the CWC poll process has been initiated is a blow to Kesri.

The other two followed swiftly. The Subjects Committee reversed important sections of the first draft political resolution and came up with the second draft which will be taken up tomorrow morning.

The portions on the Babri Masjid demolition are specifically glaring. The first draft said the Congress deeply regretted the Babri Masjid demolition while the second shifts it to a regret of the inability to carry out the legal responsibility in protecting the Babri Masjid’.

The second draft says the Congress strongly condemns the vandalism of the BJP and its allies in demolishing the mosque. The change came about under pressure from Sharad Pawar, Pranab Mukherjee and others who felt the wording was hitting out at Steering Committee members who were part of the Rao ministry.

The other change in the draft political resolution is on the issue of corruption.

The first one hit out at the Rao government and called for an ethics committee to look into the matter. This draft added that omissions and commissions of Congressmen had led to the party’s worst electoral defeat in 1996.

The second draft ignores all this and merely says the record of the Congress in this aspect is unimpeachable. Rao was thus let off despite Kesri’s known dislike for his predecessor.

Pretty much the same thing happened in the economic resolution too. Kesri’s idea was to shift from Rao’s economic policy, tone it down and have a pro-poor tilt’. This didn’t happen and the resolution was passed without major alterations.