Many members of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) panels which are preparing the draft proposals to be placed before the party’s Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session) in Udaipur next week are pushing for major organisational reforms and significant enhancement of the reservation quota for the socially backward sections in the party structure, according to people aware of the matter.

These proposals are subject to consensus within the panels, and clearance of the Congress Working Committee (CWC) and Chintan Shivar, they said.

As these panels worked late on Saturday to finalise their draft proposals for the perusal of Monday’s pre-Chintan Shivir CWC meeting, many members of the AICC’s social and empowerment committee are learnt to have pushed to enhance the quota for other backward communities, scheduled castes, scheduled tribes and minorities in the party to 50% or more from the existing 20%.

The enhanced quota should be applicable from the block level to the AICC, Pradesh Congress Committees and preferably the CWC as well, they argued, saying higher quota is essential to make the Congress organisation truly reflect the social arithmetic of the population, besides giving each of the four segments their rightful representation.

The move is also inspired by the party’s need for careful electoral positioning in view of the “social justice” plank of the regional parties and the BJP’s “Hindu” plank. The Congress already has a 33% quota for women. Digvijaya Singh, Kumari Selja, Meira Kumar, K Raju, SS Randhawa are among the members of the panel headed by Salman Khurshid.

Organisational reforms

The committee on organisational matters is learnt to have proposed reforms, restructuring and removal of “excess baggage” in many organisational posts. Among the proposals pushed by its members are to end the practice of constituting mega panels of office-bearers, both in the AICC and in the PCCs, by fixing caps on the numbers. There is also a proposal of empowering the leadership of PCCs to appoint the presidents of the district congress committee (DCCs) in place of the AICC leadership nominating them.