All India Congress Committee (AICC) general secretary Tariq Anwar, who is in charge of Kerala, has said party workers nominated to Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) positions are required to face organisational polls if they hope to hold on to their posts.
Speaking to journalists after a leadership conclave at Indira Bhavan here on Saturday, Mr. Anwar said the poll process would commence in April. Congress membership in Kerala would touch 50 lakh soon.
Mr. Anwar appeared to dispel the speculation that the incumbent KPCC leadership was attempting to stack the decks in its favour ahead of the organisational elections by pressing on with the membership drive. "Membership drive would not impede the organisational elections," he said somewhat bluntly.
The ‘A’ and ‘I’ groups had alleged that the distribution of party membership and nomination of office-bearers were skewed in favour of the current KPCC leadership and should halt temporarily to ensure fair inner-party elections.
The influential factions suspected a hard push by the emergent powers in the KPCC and Congress Legislature Party (CLP) to bend the party to their will by "arbitrarily" appointing their selectees in critical organisational posts in the run-up to the polls.
The powerful cliques had also objected to "hastily" cobbling together unit committees at the grassroots level, perceiving the push as a bid by the emergent official group to hijack the organisational elections.
However, Mr. Anwar appeared to brush aside their anxieties. He said the creation of unit committees was a first for the Congress and hinted that the national leadership might replicate the KPCC's "successful" model in other States.
He seemed to convey the AICC's resolve to restructure the KPCC by stating organisational polls posed no impediment to nominating the next set of office-bearers.
Last year, flashes of public acrimony between group leaders had marked the intra-party wrangling over nominations, membership distribution and creation of unit committees.
Moreover, the ‘A’ and ‘I’ groups had pointed out that KPCC president K. Sudhakaran had announced his intention to contest the party poll. The upcoming elections have reportedly triggered a flurry of clandestine group meetings as "old and emergent" factions vied with each other for organisational control.
The AICC's claim that it had bridged divisions and banned group meetings in the KPCC seemed a mirage at the current juncture.
