Ahead of the monsoon session of the parliament on Monday, Congress president Sonia Gandhi has reconstituted the parliamentary groups in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha.
Through this major reshuffling, the party introduced senior faces namely former Union minister P Chidambaram, Manish Tewari, Ambika Soni and former chief minister Digvijaya Singh.
Sonia Gandhi in a letter wrote, “As a chairperson of the CPP (Congress Parliamentary Party), I have decided to reconstitute the following groups to facilitate and ensure the effective functioning of our party in both the Houses of Parliament. These groups will meet daily during the session and can meet during the inter session periods as well where Parliament issues are concerned.”
According to the letter, Bengal MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury will continue as the Leader of the Party (LoP) in the Lok Sabha. The inclusion of Manish Tewari and Shashi Tharoor in the group suggests that Sonia Gandhi looks for more head in the party’s parliamentary decision making process.
The two leaders have joined Chowdhury along with Gaurav Gogoi (deputy leader), K Suresh (chief whip), Ravneet Singh Bittu and Manickam Tagore.
The Rajya Sabha hierarchy which had Mallikarjun Kharge as the leader of opposition, Anand Sharma (deputy leader), and Jairam Ramesh (chief whip) are now replaced by Chidambaram, Soni and Singh. These three leaders poses years of experience in the party as well as in the parliament.
Following two curtailed session, the monsoon session of the parliament is expected to be a full session. It is assumed that the session will be stormy as the opposition plans to hit the government on economy, vaccination strategy, job loss and farm issues.
The group is entrusted with several roles like coordinating with several political parties as well as deciding on key floor issues namely support a bill or the extent of cooperation with the government. It is further responsible to decide on issues that are to be raised and how the congress will manoeuvre on issues raised by the other parties.
The reconstituted group with seniors and more accessible leaders follows when the opposition camp have witnessed signs of fissures with some regional parties trying to carve out their independent space considering the upcoming state elections and the massive aim of 2024 national poll.
The Congress have two panels, one parliamentary strategy group headed by Gandhi that focuses on larger issues and the other is the smaller group which scrutinizes all the government bills and is headed by P Chidambaram.
In the past week, Congress had entrusted LoP Mallikarjun Kharge with coordination with the other parties in the parliament. Kharge is expected to play a major role in the parliament. Previously, the lack of opposition unity has resulted to be an advantage for the ruling dispensation in passing key bills such as Triple Talaq, bifurcation of Jammu and Kashmir as Union Territories and the scrapping of Article 370.
