In another move signalling changing times in the grand old party, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s team has embarked on a new project to create a new intra-party website to ensure all work done by party workers and leaders is catalogued and made available to everybody within the party.
According to party sources, the website will be first used as an experiment for the Indian Youth Congress, before being extended to the parent party depending on its success. Sources said the work on the website began almost immediately after the results of the Lok Sabha polls, which reflected the growing importance of technology in politics, and in which the Congress suffered serious reverses.
Rahul’s team, it is learnt, is working on this website as part of its larger strategy to bring in “greater transparency and accountability” in the party.
“The work is still in very initial stages and the details are being worked out. Essentially, Rahul’s team is working on a project to create a new intra-party platform for interactions. The idea is to catalogue the work done by the party on an online forum, and make it available to all party people,” a party source said.
IYC president and MP Rajiv Satav, known to be Rahul’s close aide, is monitoring the project. According to sources, this is much like Rahul’s primaries experiment which was first tested at the IYC level and then brought to the parent party, with the objective of bringing in transparency.
There are plans to link the intra-party website to social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, although the exact modalities are still being worked out. The website is likely to be made accessible right down to the party booth workers, as per the current plan, giving them the opportunity to post details of rallies and events being organised at their level.
Interestingly, the party already has at least two more such forums — Khidki and Pehchaan (for IYC) which can be accessed only by party members through a unique login and password. Party sources, however, said both these experiments have not really taken off, facing stiff resistance from party workers who felt these “distracted from ground-level politics and reduced the complex political process to surface-level experiments”.
