CWC authorises Rahul Gandhi to forge anti-BJP alliances for 2019 polls : The Tribune India

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CWC authorises Rahul Gandhi to forge anti-BJP alliances for 2019 polls

NEW DELHI: The Congress Working Committee authorised party president Rahul Gandhi to forge anti-BJP alliance with "like minded parties" for 2019 Lok Sabha elections, as the first meeting of the revamped CWC came to an end on Sunday evening.

CWC authorises Rahul Gandhi to forge anti-BJP alliances for 2019 polls

Congress president Rahul Gandhi, former party president Sonia Gandhi and former PM Manmohan Singh during the CWC meeting in New Delhi on Sunday. Tribune photo: Manas Ranjan Bhui



Aditi Tandon
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, July 22

The extended Congress Working Committee authorised party president Rahul Gandhi to forge anti-BJP alliance with "like minded parties" for 2019 Lok Sabha elections, as the first meeting of the revamped CWC came to an end on Sunday evening.

The five-hour meeting saw Rahul Gandhi admit that expanding the Congress party’s base would be its toughest challenge.

Addressing the first Congress Working Committee (CWC) meeting since it was revamped, he said: “We must find people who didn’t vote for us in each constituency and find a way to win back their hearts”.

Gandhi called the new committee "a bridge between the past, present and future" and asked party men to rise and fight for India's oppressed.

“The new CWC is an institution comprising experience and energy and will act as a bridge between the past, present and the future,” Gandhi said.

"Rahul ji has been authorised to form election campaign committee and take decisions on pre-poll and post-poll alliance," AICC general secretary Ashok Gehlot said in a press briefing at the party headquarters after the meeting ended.

Former prime minister Manmohan Singh, who also spoke at the meeting, assured Gandhi that he and all other Congressmen will help him in the onerous task of restoring India's social harmony and economic development.

“I assure Rahul Gandhiji that we will fully support him in his onerous task of restoring India's social harmony and economic development,” he said, rejecting the culture of constant "self praise and jumlas" (gimmicks), as against solid policy framework for driving the engine of growth.

Singh said the claim of doubling farm income by 2022 will require an agricultural growth rate of 14 per cent, which is nowhere in sight.

The Congress president also said the role of the Congress as the voice of India as also its responsibility of present and future, charging that the BJP attacks institutions, Dalits, tribals, backwards, minorities and the poor.

UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi cautioned her party against the “reign of despair and fear heaped upon India’s deprived and poor”. She said that the current prime minister Modi’s rhetoric showed his "desperation", and said that the countdown for the BJP-led government had begun.

She said that the Congress stood with the Congress president to help make the party’s alliances work.

“We have to rescue our people from a dangerous regime that is compromising the democracy of India,” Sonia Gandhi, the party’s former president, said at the meeting.

Gandhi constituted his first CWC last week appointing 23 regular members, 18 permanent and ten special invitees.

Sunday’s meeting is that of the extended CWC in which sitting CMs of the Congress, state chiefs and legislature party leaders are also invited.

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh is attending the meeting as part of the extended CWC after he was dropped from the CWC permanent invitee list.

The CWC is also expected to discuss the strategy for the ongoing Monsoon Session and the impact of the no-confidence motion fallout on future politics.

The committee may also null strategies for upcoming state polls in Rajasthan, MP and Chhattisgarh, besides the 2019 General Election.

Gandhi has already said he will counter BJP’s “anger with love” and gave ample evidence of his intentions by imposing a hug upon Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was stunned by the Congress chief’s unusual act which drew a reprimand from LS Speaker Sumitra Mahajan and mixed reactions outside. With PTI

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