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Gandhi also nominated Shivraj Patil, deputy leader of the party in the Lok Sabha, and Ravi to the Congress Working Committee, chief spokesman S Jaipal Reddy said in New Delhi.
Ghulam Nabi Azad, who was recently appointed president of the Jammu & Kashmir Pradesh Congress Committee, and Mahabir Prasad have been dropped as general secretaries. Prasad, however, will continue to be a member of the working committee.
Former Orissa chief minister Janki Ballab Patnaik and former Union home minister S B Chavan have been named permanent invitees to the CWC.
All Congress chief ministers, except A K Antony (Kerala) and N D Tiwari (Uttaranchal), have also been made permanent invitees to the CWC. Reddy, as the chief spokesman, will be an ex-officio invitee as well. Antony, Tiwari and Azad will continue to be CWC members.
Former Union minister Omen Deori, from Arunachal Pradesh, and former Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee president Salman Khurshid will also be special invitees to the CWC.
The Congress president also appointed three new secretaries -- former Delhi ministers Krishna Tirath and Parvez Hashmi and former MP from Punjab Iqbal Singh -- and dropped four others -- Santosh Chaudhary, Sudha Joshi, Omen Deori and Bhuvaneshwar Kalita.
She also appointed Supreme Court lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi as a spokesman of the party, along with Anand Sharma. Tom Vadakkan will continue to be the secretary of the media department, which has also been reconstituted.
Azad, Natwar Singh, Rajiv Desai, Sibte Hasan Razi, T Subbirami Reddy, B B Gupta, Prabha Thakur, Priyaranjan Dasmunshi, Suresh Pachauri, Eduardo Faleiro and Singhvi will be members of the reconstituted department.
Anil Shastri, who has been dropped as AICC secretary, will be the new editor of the Congress newspaper Sandesh.
Following the reshuffle, the party general secretaries will be Oscar Fernandes, Mohsina Kidwai, Kamal Nath, Vayalar Ravi and Mukul Wasnik while Motilal Vora remains the treasurer.
Vora has also been put in charge of the party's affairs in the politically significant state of Uttar Pradesh and Uttaranchal. Earlier Azad was looking after these states. Vora has, however, been divested of Maharashtra and Punjab.
Kamal Nath has been relieved of the charge of Assam, but retains Delhi, Orissa, West Bengal and Gujarat.
Kidwai will look after Chandigarh, Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Assam, while Fernandes continues to be entrusted with AICC meetings, party sessions, the CWC and work relating to the organisational elections.
Ravi, a former president of the Congress unit in Kerala, has been assigned Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka, while Wasnik will look after the party's frontal organisations -- the Indian Youth Congress, All-India Mahila Congress and the National Students' Union of India.
Congress secretary Ramesh Chennithala will continue to supervise the party's units in Goa, Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, Daman & Diu, Dadra & Nagar Haveli, Lakshadweep and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands, while another secretary, Mani Shankar Aiyar, will continue to look after all the north-eastern states, excluding Assam.
Secretary Janardhan Dwivedi retains charge of the Congress Seva Dal.
PTI
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