Congress Working Committee: who's going to be its 24th and last member?

CWC is a 24-member body and only 23 names have been announced till now

Who will be the last member?

Rahul Gandhi’s refurbished all-new Congress Working Committee (CWC) was announced last week. But there were some notable inclusions and equally controversial exclusions. While Deepender Singh Hooda is in, his father, former Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda is not part of the CWC — you would imagine for reasons of governance, the Congress would have liked to hear what states ruled by it had done right. Shashi Tharoor and Jairam Ramesh’s exclusion is the most surprising, as is Milind Deora’s. While Tharoor (and Deora) were part of the team that organised and rolled out Gandhi’s foreign forays; there is no one more experienced than Ramesh at drafting Common Minimum Programmes and manifestoes. Equally inexplicable is the fact that though the CWC is a 24-member body, only 23 names have been announced. So who is going to be the 24th member? 

Something is brewing 

Is the rift between Tejashwi Yadav and his brother Tej Pratap Yadav just optics? Or is there a serious problem in the Rashtriya Janata Dal parivar? On RJD’s foundation day recently, Tej Pratap’s name was omitted from the list of dignitaries attending. But posters at the party’s state headquarters and at the venue of the function, featured all family members active in politics including Tej Pratap’s wife Aishwarya. Tej Pratap said in one of his public speeches: “I am like Lord Krishna and Tejashwi is my Arjun, who will fight the demons.”  It now transpires that one of the reasons why their father, Lalu Prasad, cut short his hospitalisation and came home, is to resolve these differences between the sons.