Rahul to meet new Congress office bearers tomorrow

Gearing up for the Lok Sabha polls, Rahul Gandhi will hold his first formal interaction tomorrow with the newly-appointed Congress office bearers.

With the reconstituted AICC secretariat being seen as a team formed by the party vice-president for the Lok Sabha battle, Rahul is expected to utilise the occasion to make the organisation battle ready.

Party leaders have been saying that Rahul has asked partymen to concentrate on building up the organisation and not to focus on other issues, including alliances.

The challenges for the Congress include Assembly polls in four states, including party-ruled Rajasthan and Delhi. The two other states are Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

Assembly elections in Jharkhand also appear to be round the corner with the President's rule in the state expiring on July 18. So far, Congress has not keen to form government. Jharkhand Mukti Morcha has been pressing it for the past six months for an alliance to form a coalition in the tribal dominated state.

Besides AICC secretaries and general secretaries, the meeting will also be attended by party treasurer Motilal Vora and political secretary to Congress President, Ahmed Patel.

Prior to the meeting, Rahul has held one-to-one interaction with general secretaries in-charge of various states, especially the poll-bound states.

In the AICC secretariat's reshuffle on June 16, 12 general secretaries and 44 secretaries were appointed. The party brought in former Union Ministers Ajay Maken and C P Joshi along with Ambika Soni and Gurudas Kamat as general secretaries, and dropped Ghulam Nabi Azad and Oscar Fernandes.

Adopted by the party in January, the Jaipur Declaration had spoken of a Congress exercise to re-position and re-organise itself based on ideology and issues in preparation for the forthcoming electoral challenges, especially the general elections.

It had decided to give specific responsibilities to all the office bearers at different levels such as AICC, PCCs, DCCs and BCCs, as well as in the frontal organisations.