Cong in no hurry to declare Punjab candidates

Amitabh Shukla / Chandigarh:

Congress seems to be in no hurry to declare its candidates for the Punjab Assembly elections even though the party has come out with its list of nominees for most of the seats in Uttar Pradesh which goes to polls much later.

The Screening Committee of Congress for Punjab is expected to sit in New Delhi later this week for selection of candidates after the party invited applications for the 117 seats in the state. It has got around 1500 applications and the candidates will be selected from this list itself.

Screening Committee for the state comprises of two neutral members - Union Minister C P Joshi who hails from Rajasthan and is the Chairman and Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee President J P Agarwal who is the Vice Chairman. AICC in-charge of the state Gulchain Singh Charak, PCC President Captain Amarinder Singh and CLP leader Rajinder Kaur Bhattal are the other members of the committee which will screen out the non-serious applicants. It will hold 3-4 marathon meetings, to come to a conclusion about the candidates. Such a meeting is normally held at a ‘secret’ venue so that the aspirants do not indulge in a show of strength before the leaders to get party’s nomination.

After the Screening Committee selects a panel of names, not more than three for every constituency, it would be sent to the Central Election Committee of the party, headed by party President Sonia Gandhi. Merits and demerits of each candidate, recommended by the Screening Committee, would be spelt out by the C P Joshi led committee. The Central Election Committee has 14 members, including Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, AICC General Secretary Rahul Gandhi, amongst others, as a member and it will finally select the candidate after getting inputs from the Screening Committee.

Given that the process is lengthy and this is followed as a rule, the announcement of candidates could only be made at the earliest by the end of this year and that too if the party shows urgency. In the last week of December, most of the members of the Central Election Committee would be out of Delhi as Parliament would not be in session and also due to the Christmas and New Year break. This means that the first list of the party could come out only around the time of filing of nominations and candidates would get barely three weeks to prepare themselves and fight the polls.

Unlike Punjab, in UP, where the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, Rahul Gandhi is taking personal interest, the process of Screening Committee and Central Election Committee meetings was concluded much earlier. In fact, the process started more than six months ago and candidates asked to campaign instead of keep waiting for the ticket at the last moment.

Ironically, the delay in declaration of candidates in Punjab comes even though the Antony Committee of the party had recommended in 2008 that candidates should be selected much in advance to give them sufficient time for preparations. The Antony Committee was formed in 2008 after the debacle of Congress in a series of elections beginning Punjab in 2007 polls and later in Karnataka assembly elections in 2008. It was tasked to find out the reasons of the slump of the party and recommend remedial measures.

The Committee had also recommended that the leader in-charge of the organisation in the states and general secretaries should not fight the polls but lead the party and supervise its campaign. This norm has been breached so often that it is not even being talked about in the party now. PCC chief Captain Amarinder Singh, who is also spearheading the poll campaign, will himself slug it out in Patiala even though the constituency is a pocket borough of the former Maharaja and his family. (Dec 7, 2011)

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