Early Times Report
Jammu, Aug 20: Congress high command on Sunday nominated two prominent faces from Jammu and Kashmir namely Ghulam Ahmed Mir and Tariq Hamid Karra in the newly constituted Congress Working Committee (CWC)-the highest decision-making body of the party.
Mir and Karra belong to Kashmir Valley so there is no representation from Jammu in the highest decision-making body of the grand-old party.
It is the first time that there is no representation of Jammu in the CWC. Earlier Ghulam Nabi Azad and Dr. Karan Singh used to represent Jammu in the CWC.
Dr. Karan Singh, the former Sadr-e-Risayat of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, is the son of the last Dogra ruler Maharaja Hari Singh, was dropped when CWC was reconstituted in 2018 by the then Congress president Rahul Gandhi.
“I had joined Congress in 1967. But in the last 8-10 yrs, I’m no more in Parliament, I was dropped from the working committee.
Yes, I’m in Congress but there’s no contact, nobody asks me anything. I do my work. My relations with the party are almost zero now”, Dr. Singh had stated last year in a statement.
Ghulam Nabi Azad has already resigned from the party.
Some Congress leaders were expecting representation of Jammu in the CWC.
Ghulam Ahmed Mir, who is the former president of J&K Congress, is nominated as a member of the CWC while Karra is nominated as a special invitee in the highest-decision making body of the party.
Former Finance Minister of J&K, Tariq Hamid Karra is renominated in the CWC.
Karra is one of the founder members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) but he opposed the party’s alliance with BJP.
On September 15, 2016, Karra had resigned from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and Lok Sabha.
“I was feeling suffocated by the alliance and new avatar adorned by the PDP. My conscience cannot take it anymore.
As a mark of protest against sell-out to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), I am disassociating myself from the primary membership of the party as well as Parliament,”, Karra said at that time.
“Seeds of deceit, discontent, and betrayal got sown in the hearts and minds of the people that very day when the PDP got into an alliance with the BJP and formed the government”, he said. Later on February 19, 2017, Karra joined Congress.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Sunday reconstituted the 84-member Congress Working Committee (CWC).
The new CWC has 39 regular members, 32 permanent invitees, including some in-charges of state, and 13 special invitees, including presidents of the Youth Congress, the National Students’ Union of India, the Mahila Congress and the Seva Dal as ex-officio members.
As per reports the new CWC, which replaces the Steering Committee that was formed as a stop-gap arrangement after Kharge became the party president on October 10 last year, has been announced as the principal opposition party prepares for a crucial round of assembly polls in the coming months and the 2024 general elections. |
