Mallikarjun Kharge
Mallikarjun Kharge forms Congress steering committee comprising Gandhis, Manmohan Singh
New Delhi/IBNS: New Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge has formed a steering committee with 47 members including Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi.
The committee will function in place of the Congress's Working Committee, which is the highest decision-making body of the party and function till the plenary session is held.
New members of the Working Committee will be chosen at the next AICC (All-India Congress Committee) session.
On Wednesday morning, the members of the Congress Working Committee stepped down as a part of the convention when a new chief is elected, to enable him to choose his team.
"All the CWC members, AICC general secretaries and in-charges have tendered their resignation to Congress president," said AICC general secretary Organisation KC Venugopal.
All the office bearers -- general secretaries and in-charges -- have now been included in the steering committee.
Kharge took charge earlier in the day as the 98th Congress president succeeding the longest-serving party chief Sonia Gandhi, in a formal materialising of the overhaul in the biggest opposition unit of the country.
Eighty-year-old Kharge, a loyalist of the Gandhi-Nehru family that has produced three Prime Ministers, is the first in 22 years to become the Congress president hailing from outside the clan.
He was handed over the election certificate by Congress central election authority chairman, Madhusudan Mistry, in presence of Sonia Gandhi, her politician son Rahul Gandhi and daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who are important members of the party.
Kharge won the elections over erudite Thiruvananthapuram MP Shashi Tharoor by a huge margin on Oct 19.
The president-elect got 7,897 as opposed to Tharoor's mere 1,072, paving the way to become the second Dalit chief after Jagjivan Ram of the country's oldest political party.
After winning the elections, Kharge, a former Union Minister who has equal proficiency in Hindi and English, gave a message for "unity" to take on Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) that has led the Congress to the brink of elimination in the political map.
"We all have to work like workers of the party, nobody is big or small in the party.
"We have to unitedly fight against the fascist forces that are attacking the democratic institutions under the garb of communalism," Kharge, who has a record of winning assembly elections nine consecutive times, had said.
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