CWC meet on poll debacle today

• Clamour for serious introspection, revamp
• Kamal Nath warns against patronage politics

New Delhi: Shell-shocked over its worst-ever performance in the Lok Sabha polls, the Congress Working Committee (CWC) meets here on Sunday amidst a clamour within for a surgical action to revamp the party. Though directly no one may point fingers at Rahul Gandhi, the role of his key advisers including Jairam Ramesh, Mohan Gopal, Madhusudan Mistri and Mohan Prakash may be questioned.

As the party searches for answers for its disastrous performance, senior minister Kamal Nath has already sounded a word of caution against "patronage politics" and felt that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should have been more forthright and that the communication was a problem. A number of Union Ministers could also face the ire of party leaders at the meet for their "total lack of communication" with party workers. As several Union Cabinet ministers lost in their respective seats miserably, a senior party leader said that there was a total disconnect of the ministers with party workers and their "arrogance" is to be blamed for the backlash against the party.

While party sources have ruled out reports of Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi offering to resign in the wake of debacle, the meeting could see some leaders raising uncomfortable questions about the party's campaign and alliance strategy. There are questions being raised about the style of working of Rahul Gandhi but doubts are being expressed whether anyone would be bold to raise them in the meeting to be presided over by Sonia.

An exercise has already begun in the party to insulate Rahul from any blame game. Sonia and Rahul had appeared before the media on Friday and taken personal responsibility for the drubbing that left the party with just 44 seats in a House of 543, a huge climbdown from 206 seats it had in the outgoing Lok Sabha. There are demands from the leaders that this time the customary practice of setting up a committee to go into the reasons for the defeat and then forgetting it should not be repeated. Accountability should be clearly fixed and action taken wherever there are individual responsibilities, a party leader said. "Serious introspection is needed but surely not like in the past when suggestions arising out of the introspection were never implemented," Anil Shastri, who is a special invitee to the CWC, said on Twitter. Shastri, son of former Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri, is believed to have written a blunt letter to Rahul on what had gone wrong and what needed to be done to get the party back on rails.