Congress sends ex-CM Faleiro to Goa to head state unit

Former Chief Minister Luizinho Faleiro was on Tuesday made the chief of the Congress unit in Goa as he became the first AICC general secretary to be shifted from the party headquarters to look after his home state.

"Congress President Sonia Gandhi has appointed Faleiro, presently General Secretary in AICC, as President of the Goa Pradesh Congress Committee in place of John Fernandez with immediate effect," AICC general secretary (Organisation), Janardan Dwivedi, said in a release here.

Faleiro's appointment as the Goa PCC chief comes at a time when a reshuffle of the AICC is due and could see a number of general secretaries being given responsibilities in their home states.

Faleiro was the AICC general secretary in-charge of the northeastern states. Sources in AICC have been maintaining that the reshuffle could happen any time after the upcoming Assembly elections are over.

While Maharashtra and Haryana are going to polls on Oct 15, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir are likely to have Assembly elections by the year-end. All the 40 block committees of Goa Congress were dissolved in August of this year and the talk of Fernandez being replaced had been doing the rounds for some months in the state.