Where are those Congress reports gathering dust?

The more things change, the more they remain the same! That certainly appears to be the dictum by which the Congress party and its leadership lives and works.

Running true to form and expectation, Congress party president Sonia Gandhi has appointed a committee headed by Union defence minister A K Antony, to be assisted by Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dixit and Union Power Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde to analyse the reasons for the party's defeat in the UP, Goa, Uttarakhand and Punjab elections.

He is expected to give his report by the end of the month.

Antony is sure to be suffering from mixed emotions at once again being honoured to probe the party's defeat in the recently-held elections. But at the same time, this must have brought to mind the fate of those reports which he had prepared earlier and where remedial action was also suggested and he must be wondering where those reports are gathering dust -- in which deep dark corner of the AICC office.

None of the suggestions were ever implemented and nothing came of the reports, except that those days the CWC used to meet so a meeting was convened and the report was discussed.

It was in the aftermath of the 1999 Lok Sabha elections when the Congress put up one of its worst shows ever getting only 114 Lok Sabha seats that the Congress president had constituted an 11 member committee to analyse the defeat and suggest remedial measures. Antony and his team gave the report where organisational failures were listed as one of the key reasons for the party's defeat in a general election.

According to a senior congress leader, betting is already on in the Congress that organisational failures and poor co-ordination would once again be listed as one of the reasons for the defeat.

Antony had also suggested that tickets should be distributed early so as to give the candidate time to campaign and make himself familiar with the terrain. Over the years, the party never accepted this piece of advice and despite the overwhelming plea of prospective candidates, tickets continued to be distributed at the eleventh hour.

Antony is again likely to repeat this as one of his remedial pieces of advice.

Interestingly, in 2008, the Congress president once again picked up Antony to head yet another committee after the defeat of the Congress in the Karnataka elections.

The CWC resolution at the time had said, "The party had the capacity to draw correct lessons from temporary electoral defeats and re-energise itself to meet emerging challenges."

These golden words of the CWC can be applied to today's scenario in the party, just as it applied to what happened yesterday!

The Antony committee was asked to suggest measures for the assembly elections to be held later in 2008 in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir and Mizoram and for the general elections to be held in 2009.

A lot of the effort was also duplicated by the group on future challenges, which also gave its report under Veerappa Moily but again no one knows what happened to that report.

In the meantime, the Pranab Mukherjee committee was constituted in 2003 after the party's defeat in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh assemblies and to create a roadmap for the 2004 Lok Sabha elections.

Before that in 1998, the much-hyped P A Sangma committee to revitalise the party was set up and there was the Manmohan Singh committee, the K Karunakaran committee etc.

The reports of all these committees are gathering dust somewhere and no one even remembers what was in those reports, which were complied after meeting a large number of workers, leaders, state units and others.

But in all these years nothing has changed -- neither the problem of the workers nor the working style of the party's central leaders nor the manner in which the party has failed to learn from its many mistakes.

Maybe Sonia and the now virtually defunct CWC should merely fish out the earlier reports, which run into hundreds of pages (the 1999 Antony report was over 200 pages long), dust them and re-read them, instead of creating an illusion that after the report things may change in the Congress party.