KOCHI: While the Congress state president is pleading with his colleagues to cooperate in organisational rejig, a feeder organisation of the party has shown the parent body an exemplary way of selecting its state and district level functionaries--that is election via secret ballot.
Indian Lawyers’ Congress (ILC), the frontal organisation of the party representing lawyers practising in various courts of the state, for the first time, conducted elections through a secret ballot to pick the office-bearers of its Kerala High Court unit, which has the status of a district committee. The poll was held at an exclusive polling centre set up on the High Court premises. Of the 415 members, 265 exercised their franchise on Wednesday. The elections to the remaining 14 district committees will be held in the same manner soon.
The Indian Lawyers Congress, which claims to be the biggest union of lawyers, has unit committees in 87 court centres in the state. As per the bylaw, 10 per cent of the total members will be elected to the state committee while 20 per cent will be elected to the district committees. After the completion of the elections to the district units, the election to the state general council will be held.
A 20-member state secretariat will be constituted from the general council and the office-bearers will be elected from these members. Congress leaders including former state Congress vice-president Lali Vincent and former director general of prosecution and former president of ILC, T Asaf Ali, are in the fray.
The ILC state committee headed by Raju Joseph, a senior lawyer at the High Court, was dissolved last year following a detailed report on the organisational issues submitted by KPCC general secretary Mariapuram Sreekumar, the lawyer who is in charge of ILC. Prior to this, Asaf Ali resigned from the president post following internal bickering. The organisational elections were not held for many years in ILC and 16 of the 20 members of the state unit were from the High Court unit. Considering this, Congress state president K Sudhakaran deputed Mariapuram Sreekumar and V S Chandrasekharan, KPCC legal aid committee chairman, to reconstitute the organisation as per the bylaw.
Mariapuram Sreekumar said the secret ballot election will help the organisation get functionaries from all sections, including youth and women lawyers across the state, and it will infuse more strength and energy to the organisation.”Office-bearers of ILC coming from a particular unit alone cannot be accepted. The party wants representation from all sections. KPCC intends to transform ILC into a platform for providing legal assistance to all the Congress workers in the state in political cases,” he added.
Formerly the KPCC Legal Aid Cell, the ILC was set up in 2008. “I was elected president of ILC in 2009 and Delhi Chief Minister, Aravind Kejriwal, who was a known social activist at that time, attended the state conference. However, this is for the first time an election via secret ballot is conducted. The elections to the HC unit were held in a transparent manner and there was no room for complaints,” said Asaf Ali.