Rahul Gandhi wants 40 per cent party posts reserved for youth

New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi, who chaired his first meeting of the party’s steering committee on Saturday, pitched hard for a more substantive change in the working and vision of the party by reserving 40 per cent of all organisational positions for youth.

Sources said that the Congress organisational structure already has provisions for 33 per cent of posts being reserved for women and 20 per cent for Scheduled Castes. The 40 per cent quota for youth would be over and above this.

That is, even among women and SC/STs, 40 per cent should be youth.

It was not clear whether the steering committee approved the proposal or not, nor how the Congress president defined “youth”.

The meeting, which was attended by Congress parliamentary party chief Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, among others, finalised the schedule for the plenary session to be held on March 16-18 in Delhi.

The AICC plenary will discuss and evolve the party’s future strategy, and it will ratify the December 11 election of Mr Gandhi as Congress president, ending the entire process of organisational elections.

Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala told the media that the steering committee discussed three major issues: Going forward with the dynamism of the youth and the experience of seniors; representation of women and Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes in the party organisation; and building a narrative for the country based on jobless growth, problems of farmers and landless labourers.

Mr Randeep Surjewala, however, did not clarify whether the issue of holding elections to the Congress Working Committee was discussed. Till now CWC members have mostly been selected by the party president.

The steering committee, with 34 members, was set up on Friday after the dissolution of the Congress Working Committee.

While all outgoing CWC members are part of the new steering committee, some special invitees such as Amarinder Singh, Vilas Muttemwar, R.K. Dhawan, Shivajirao Deshmukh, M.V. Rajasekharan and Mohsina Kidwai, as well as special invitees have been dropped from the new panel.

The steering committee will function till the plenary session, after which a new CWC will be put in place.

As per the party’s constitution, the 25-member CWC has 12 elected members and 11 nominated members, besides the Congress president and the chairperson of the Congress parliamentary party. However, elections to the 12 positions have only been held five times in the party’s 133-year history. The Congress has, in the recent past, faced many questions, especially from rival BJP, on the lack of internal democracy in the party.

The steering committee meeting, which was also attended by former finance minister P. Chidambaram, and senior leaders Ahmed Patel, Anand Sharma besides all state in-charges, also issued a statement on the PNB scam and demanded that Prime Minister Narendra Modi apprise the nation of complete facts about the biggest “Bank Scam” instead of remaining “silent as usual”.

“The Prime Minister must also tell the nation how a fraud of this magnitude escaped the eyes of all the auditors and investigators conducting ‘statutory audit’, ‘internal audit’, ‘concurrent audit’ and even the RBI’s own audit?” the statement said.

Mr Chidambaram is understood to have explained in detail all the facets of the bank scam and asserted that this could not have happened without clearance from the top echelons of the government.

Sources said that party leaders also opined that pressure should be stepped up on the Nirav Modi scam as it has caught the attention of the country. The second part of Budget session of Parliament begins on March 5.