Congress Working Committee


The Congress Working Committee is the executive committee of the Indian National Congress. It was formed in December 1920 at Nagpur session of INC which was headed by C. Vijayaraghavachariar. It typically consists of fifteen members elected from the All India Congress Committee. It is headed by the Working President.
attends a Congress Working Committee meeting at Anand Bhavan, Allahabad; Vallabhbhai Patel to the left, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit to the right, January 1940.
The Working Committee has had different levels of power in the party at different times. In the period prior to independence in 1947, the Working Committee was the centre of power, and the Working President was frequently more active than the Congress President. In the period after 1967, when the Congress Party split for the first time, the power of the Working Committee declined; but Indira Gandhi'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. 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".

Composition

President
Members
Permanent Invitees
Special Invitees

Criticism

The Congress has not held internal elections to CWC for nearly 20 years in 2017 when Election Commission ordered it to hold internal elections. When Congress was trying to forge an alliance with ideologically opposite Shiv Sena in Maharashtra in 2019, Congress leader Sanjay Nirupam publicly urged Sonia Gandhi to dissolve the CWC, saying "they cannot be trusted anymore."
Ever since Rahul Gandhi's resignation as party president in July 2019, there is persistent confusion over whether he continues to be a CWC member or not. A paper by Observer Research Foundation calls a large number of CWC members "unprincipled, opportunists and self-serving individuals for whom self-interest is paramount."