Congress Working Committee

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The executive committee of the Congress Party in India, typically consisting of fifteen members elected from the All India Congress Committee or AICC, is known as the Congress Working Committee or CWC. It is headed by the Working President.

The Working Committee has held different levels of power in the organisation at different times. In the period prior to Independence in 1947, the Working Committee was the centre of power, and the Working President frequently more active than the Congress President. In the period after 1967, when the Congress party split for the first time, between factions loyal to Indira Gandhi and those led by the Syndicate of regional bosses including Kamaraj and Morarji Desai, the power of the Working Committee declined; but Indira's triumph in 1971 led to a re-centralisation of power away from the states and the All-India Congress Committee, and caused the Working Committee in Delhi to once again be the paramount decision-making body of the party^[1]. The centralised nature of Congress decision making has since caused observers in the states to informally describe instructions from Delhi as coming from the "High Command"^{[citation needed]}.

1. ^ "Towards a More Competitive Party System in India", Ram Joshi and Kirtidev Desai, Asian Survey, Vol. 18, No. 11. (Nov., 1978), pp. 1091-1116.