On a day the All India Congress Committee (AICC) announced that the first meeting of the reconstituted Congress Working Committee (CWC) will be held in Hyderabad in the Assembly poll-bound Telangana later this month,

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge recast the party’s Central Election Committee (CEC), inducting several state-level leaders while removing veterans like A K Antony, Janardan Dwivedi and M Veerappa Moily besides the 90-year-old ex-Prime Minister Manmohan Singh from it.

The CEC is headed by the Congress president, which selects the party’s candidates for the Lok Sabha and the Assembly elections.

The members of the previous CEC were former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi, Antony, Ambika Soni, Girija Vyas, Dwivedi, Moily, Mukul Wasnik and Mohsina Kidwai besides general secretary (organisation) K C Venugopal.

All of them barring the Gandhis, Soni and Venugopal have been dropped from the new CEC.

The new members of the 16-member CEC include Congress leader in Lok Sabha Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, Salman Khurshid, Madhusudan Mistry, N Uttam Kumar Reddy, Chhattisgarh Deputy Chief Minister T S Singh Deo, Karnataka minister K J George, ex-Uttarakhand Congress chief Pritam Singh, Kishanganj MP Mohammad Jawed, Rajya Sabha MP Amee Yajnik, P L Punia and Madhya Pradesh MLA Omkar Markam.

Their induction is a major elevation for Congress leaders like Reddy, Deo, George, Singh, Jawed, Yajnik and Markam, who will now be at the party high table as members of the high-powered panel. Mistry was the head of the Congress Central Election Authority, which conducted the party’s presidential elections last year. Punia was till recently the AICC in-charge of Chhattisgarh.

Earlier on Monday, the Congress leadership sent a signal that it was preparing to wage an aggressive campaign for the Telangana Assembly elections, announcing that Hyderabad will be the venue of the first meeting of the rejigged CWC on September 16-17. This will be followed by a rally, where the party will kickstart the campaign announcing five big election promises, which it calls “guarantees”.

The Congress believes that the two-day CWC session, followed by a rally and an “innovative yatra” to Telangana’s all 119 Assembly constituencies, would set the tempo for the party’s campaign. The idea behind the three-day blitz is to set a narrative that the party is taking the Telangana polls seriously and will make every effort to unseat the K Chandrashekar Rao-led BRS government.

The Congress leaders from the state had been talking about “positive” internal survey results to project a narrative that the party was gaining ground against the ruling BRS and an aggressive BJP.