With Lok Sabha elections just a year away, a key committee of the Congress embarked on an exercise aimed at turning around the electoral fortunes of the grand old party, which has been been on a losing spree.
   
Defence Minister A K Antony and his team have a daunting task at hand as they have to submit their report to Congress President Sonia Gandhi [Images] within a fortnight with a recipe for success in the coming Assembly elections as also the Lok Sabha polls.
    
The committee at its first meeting drew up its broad agenda that includes reorganising state-level units such as pradesh congress committees and district congress committees, fine-tuning the campaigning strategy, giving appropriate publicity to achievements of the government and making a better selection of candidates.
    
Antony declined to speak about the deliberations, only saying: "All members attended the meeting. We will meet again. The proceedings of the meeting have to be submitted to Sonia Gandhi, so I will not say anything about the meeting."
    
"The working of the committee is target-oriented, with the specific goal of preparing the party for the coming assembly and general elections," Union Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar, who is a member of the committee, told media-persons after the meeting.
    
Thursday's meeting set the timetable for the committee which was set up by Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday to set the house in order prior to the coming polls.
    
The next meeting of the committee will be on June 12 and the last on June 20. Antony, who had in the late nineties headed a similar panel called the introspection committee, had at that time strongly recommended that the party should finalise its candidates well in advance as against the usual practice of selecting them at the 11th hour. The committee was formed in 1999 after the worst ever debacle of the party in the Lok Sabha elections.
    
The party had also set up a task force almost a decade ago under the leadership of P A Sangma to suggest ways to strengthen the organisation. The Antony committee will look at the recommendations made by earlier committees such as those headed by Pranab Mukherjee, P A Sangma, Manmohan Singh [Images] and K Karunakaran.
 
The seven-member committee has Ghulam [Images] Nabi Azad as the only chief minister on the panel and also includes All India Congress Committee General Secretaries Digvijay Singh and Mukul Wasnik as also senior leader Urmila Singh. Besides Antony and Aiyar, the panel also has Union Minister P R Dasmunsi on it.
    
The group was constituted by Gandhi as a follow-up to a decision taken at the Congress working committee meeting on Saturday, which was held in the backdrop of the defeat in Karnataka.
   
The committee has been asked to submit its suggestions to the Congress president within 15 days.
    
The future challenges group of the Congress headed by senior leader M Veerappa Moily has also been going into the issue of reviving the party by suggesting intra-party reforms. AICC General Secretary Rahul Gandhi [Images] is a member of the group.  

The Congress has lost as many as 13 elections since it came to power at the Centre in  2004. Recently, it faced defeat in Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka.