The draft was cleared for tomorrow's AICC session scheduled to ratify Sonia's election as party president. In keeping with the trend after she took over, Sonia kept the CWC meeting brief and to the point.

Avoiding references to smaller parties is said to be the only major shift in stand since Sitaram Kesri's time when the Congress flayed the smaller regional parties and said they had no role to play in national politics. In the last August Congress plenary session at Calcutta, the Congress had declared that one-party rule was still valid.

But since then, the party barely hung on to its Lok Sabha tally in the elections while the BJP managed to cobble alliances with sundry small parties and get to power at the Centre. Clearly this has caughtSonia's attention and after the Maharashtra success, where Pawar arrived at alliances with small parties, she is keen to keep this option open in future.

However, the emphasis still is on strengthening the organisation and only alliances with Congress as the leading player are likely to be cleared. Sonia is slated to tour various parts of the country after the AICC session and the idea is to beef up the party where it is weak.

The rest of the resolution is believed to have dealt with an analysis of where and why the party fared badly in the recent general elections and a large portion has been reserved on the rise of "communal and fascist forces" in the country, the targets being the RSS and the BJP. Some minor changes in language in some areas was also done in today's CWC meeting.

But a crucial area left open was a suggested amendment to Article 21 of the Congress Constitution where the elected CWC members are granted a mandatory period of two years in office, irrespective of who is party president.The amendment was to give a party president powers to revamp the entire CWC including the 10 elected members when a new president is appointed, and is said to be the brainchild of Arjun Singh, Pranab Mukherjee and Ahmed Patel.

Apparently, some technical points were raised that a month's notice has to be given for any amendment to the party constitution which is then to be ratified by an AICC session. The other simmering issue is the fate of some top leaders who lost the Lok Sabha poll in light of Sonia's expressing regret yesterday that she was misled into granting defeated candidates Rajya Sabha nominations like Oscar Fernandes, Sontosh Mohan Deb and N C Parasher.

While Arjun Singh put up a brave face today saying he agreed with Sonia's expression of regret, others were not so sure. Singh said he was never keen to get into the Rajya Sabha and that he found Sonia's statement yesterday correct. But with him are people like Sheila Dikshit, Satish Sharma, Margaret Alva, ND Tewari, Jagannath Mishra, VCShukla, Deepa Kaul, Salman Khursheed and KP Singh Deo, all who were defeated in the recent polls.

Sonia's regret raises questions on party vice-president Prasada's future as he and Fernandes were the ones who briefed Sonia on the RS nominations. It also gives people like Matang Singh a respite after he was complained against by Deb and Assam PCC chief Tarun Gogoi. Singh was alleged to have helped Deb's defeat and he in turn wrote to Sonia saying she was misled.

Singh's stand now stands vindicated by Sonia herself, a fact he wrote to her about in another letter today.