Pawar left this evening for Mumbai en route to South Africa with a letter from Congress president Sonia Gandhi to African National Congress president Thabo Mbeki. With Pawar will be four other leaders, all from the Maharashtra sugar lobby: ex-MP Shivajirao Patil, V P Rane, who heads the Vasant Dada Sugar Institute, current Maharashtra MLA Jayant Patil and former State finance minister Y J Mohite.

Pawar will be in South Africa for a week and his return here is scheduled for September 21. By then, the CWC would have put into motion the organisational changes which the party's Pachmarhi conclave had cleared. For example, the issue of keeping defectors waiting for two to three years before giving them any party post, increasing the size of the DCCs, PCCs, AICC and,possibly, the CWC.

Also to be taken up are several amendments to the Congress constitution which were cleared in Pachmarhi relating to frontal organisations, increasing the terms of office-bearers and more representation to women, Dalits, minorities and OBCs in the party structure.

However, the interesting aspect is Pawar's absence which is now falling into a pattern after he was chosen Lok Sabha Opposition leader instead of the CPP head, as was initially considered possible. The Pawar camp says each time he had a valid and unavoidable reason for missing CWC meetings, including a knee operation, a death in the family and now the trip to Johannesburg.

In any case, Pawar kept away from political and organisational matters in the Pachmarhi camp preferring to focus on foreign affairs instead. The CWC is expected to be followed by meetings of the Karunakaran committee which is looking into changes in the party constitution. Once this committee formalises the changes in the Congress constitution, the CWC isslated to meet again.

All this is scheduled to be capped by a special meeting of the AICC, after the coming round of assembly elections in four states, which will finally endorse the structural changes.

Tomorrow's CWC is also likely to take up the assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Mizoram. Initial reports suggest the Congress might do better in Rajasthan and Delhi and could be in a spot in Madhya Pradesh. The fight is basically between the Congress and the BJP in all four states and is being seen as round one in the contest for political supremacy between the two.