Congress leaders vouch that the booth committee is the nucleus of the party which has to be strengthened before the Lok Sabha elections.
Thiruvananthapuram: The Congress has started the process to strengthen the booth committees amid speculations that Prime Minister Narendra Modi may call general elections next year. Mr Mullapally Ramachandran, AICC’s organisational election committee chairman, has said that the election to the posts of president, mandalam delegate and block delegate of booth committees will be held from August 7 to 20.
According to AICC in-charge P. C. Chacko, the Congress is way ahead of the CPM in forming booth committees as Mr Modi may call a snap poll next year.
So far almost 75 percent of the booth committees have been formed. “On an election day, it is the booth committees which work hard. Congress has realised that there is no point in organising committees at other levels. But the factionalism in the party is preventing it from forming all the booth committees,” said Mr Chacko.
Congress leaders vouch that the booth committee is the nucleus of the party which has to be strengthened before the Lok Sabha elections.
However, instead of booth committee elections, the ‘I’ and ‘A’ camps may decide on sharing of posts. A prominent KPCC general secretary told DC that the party does not have the capacity to hold elections at the grassroots level.
“Group leaders will emerge from the farce of booth committee elections. They will not have the support of the local people,” he said.
The Congress has been trying hard to form nearly 24, 000 booth committees across the state. There are 1,500 votes per booth committee and 300 - 400 households where the Congress wants to make inroads.
During the recent membership campaign, the leaders had added new members by lifting the voters’ list procured from the election commission. A section of leaders was unhappy with the family meetings organised by the KPCC leadership as they alleged that the meetings were well-attended only because of the presence of top leaders.
