New Delhi, Apr 9: With the debacle in recent assembly polls coming as a jolt, Congress is planning major changes in government at the Centre rpt at the Centre and the party in some states in an apparent bid to prepare itself to face the next Lok Sabha polls.
A senior party leader said the changes could also involve government and organisation in some party-ruled states.
The changes will be carried out after the A K Antony Committee, which is reviewing the defeat in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Goa and not-so-good show in Uttarkhand, submits its report by the monthend. The budget session of Parliament concludes on May 22.
Changes being contemplated will be “neither cosmetic nor drastic” and would be aimed at bringing new faces to the fore to help face the challenge of 2014 parliamentary elections, the leader said.
A number of ministers from Uttar Pradesh had courted controversy during the Assembly elections. Congress President Sonia Gandhi has already ruled out change of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the wake of the electoral verdict.
A number of PCC Chiefs have to be appointed including those in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and Mumbai and there is talk that the party organisation in Uttar Pradesh will be changed even at the district level following the poll debacle.
Union Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh is under opposition attack in the wake of the Supreme Court observations in the case relating to land allotment to Subhash Ghai's Whistling Woods Institute as also in a CAG report which is yet to be tabled in the Maharashtra assembly.
Unease is growing in the party in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh which had returned spectacular results for Congress in the last two Lok Sabha elections.
