NEW DELHI: An almost blow-by-blow account of the goings-on in a ‘members only’ meeting of the Congress Working Committee on Monday led to some finger-pointing in the already fraught exchanges between party members as various tweets, some only to be withdrawn, were posted detailing comments by participants in the deliberations.
With the coronavirus pandemic forcing the usual closed-door, no-phones-allowed CWC discussions to go virtual, proceedings appeared to have turned particularly leaky, with a steady flow of information being “live tweeted” and aired on TV with the tit-bits being lapped up with gusto and leading to more online conversations.
The developments led to concerns being raised by senior members like organisation general secretary K C Venugopal and Ahmed Patel who referred to photographs and information about proceedings being reported live. A visibly angry Patel, sources said, even said the leaks will be probed and action taken as TV screens had shots of Sonia Gandhi in the web platform.
With the dissenters’ letter to Congress brass leaked just a day before, even Ghulam Nabi Azad, among the signatories, referred to the minute-by-minute news reports of the proceedings. This was read as an attempt, some said, to argue that information about the letter was not all that was compromised.

Things came to a head, however, when reports of Rahul Gandhi accusing the dissenters of “colluding with BJP” surfaced and were followed by another alleging that Azad had offered to resign if Gandhi could “prove his involvement with BJP”. Senior member Kapil Sibal, who is not a member of the CWC, withdrew an angry tweet saying he had been misinformed.
Azad said, “Let me make it very clear that Rahul Gandhi at no point of time has said, either outside or in the CWC meeting, that the letter was written at the instance, or at the behest or in collusion with the BJP… Some Cong persons wrote yesterday that we are doing this at the behest of BJP. It is in that reference that I said that it is most unfortunate that some of our colleagues outside the CWC had gone to extent of saying that the letter was sent at the behest of BJP… In the meeting I said those people who are outside the CWC who are making these allegations should prove it and I will resign if they prove it. Rahul Gandhi at no point said the letter was sent at the behest of BJP.”
While Twitterati had a field day at the expense of Congress’s warring, sources said fingers were pointed at a former MP for sharing the screen shot of the virtual meeting, and another senior functionary with close links with the media, for ‘leaking’ information. A section of social media, however, also trained guns at the dissenting leaders, alleging that the leaks were their handiwork. Former social media head of the Congress Divya Spandana, who has resurfaced recently, said, “Not only did they leak the letter to the media, they continue to feed/leak minute-to-minute conversations of the CWC meeting that’s going on right now to the media. Amazing!”
The sanctity of CWC getting compromised, however, left many leaders saying that this was a small but telling sign of the disarray in which Congress has plunged in recent years.