CWC goes into poll debacle

NEW DELHI, Oct 22 (PTI)— Top Congress leaders tonight set out on a marathon exercise of analysing the causes of the worse electoral debacle of the party at a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC).

The apex policy making body of the party deliberated on the poor showing in the Congress-ruled states of Orissa, Rajasthan, Goa as also the non-Congress state of Gujarat.

The CWC meeting will continue tomorrow.Presided by party chief Sonia Gandhi, the meeting was held hours after the CBI filed a charge sheet in the 13-year old controversial Bofors payoffs case in which late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was named as an accused for the first time.

Asked by reporters after the CWC meeting as to whether she felt the charge sheet was politically motivated, she said “absolutely”. Ms Gandhi, who is also the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament, said her party would raise the issue on the floor of the House.

While it was not immediately clear whether the issue came up for discussion at the meeting, party spokesman Kapil Sibal, in his initial comment, had described the development as a "13-year-old political and legal joke".

This was the first formal meeting of the apex policy making body of the party after the elections in which the party’s tally came down to an all-time low of 112 seats. Ms Gandhi has already constituted a high-level committee headed by CWC member A. K. Antony to analyse the exact causes of the reverses.

The committee will be having a two-day sitting here from tomorrow. Ms Gandhi, who was unanimously elected chairperson of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) last week, had accepted prime responsibility for the reverses and expressed readiness to face any decision or action taken by the party.

The meeting took place in the backdrop of dissidence in the three Congress-ruled states of Orissa, Rajasthan and Delhi, demanding change of leadership in the wake of the party’s poor performance.

Senior party leader V.N. Gadgil had yesterday said that time has come to “re-examine” all the basic concepts of the party ideology, including secularism, in the wake of the organisation’s worst electoral debacle.