Swami Bengaluru - Congress gears up for polls, panels formed

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Congress gears up for polls, panels formed

Written by amith
08 July 2008
The Congress has stepped up its preparations for the next general elections.The party president Sonia Gandhi on Monday constituted two key committees with senior functionaries of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) – one for drafting the poll manifesto and the other to oversee the campaign across the country. The AICC media-cell’s chairman M Veerappa Moily made public the constitution of the two committees soon after the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh declared that the government would move ahead with the Indo-US nuclear deal and approach the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) very soon to negotiate the safeguard agreement. The party has also appointed new chiefs of the Pradesh Congress Committees (PCCs) for Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. The Left Front (LF) is likely to withdraw support to the Congress-led UPA Government, if the latter makes a step further to get the deal clinched.However, with the Samajwadi Party (SP) supporting the nuke deal and several other smaller parties likely to follow suit, the government may not find it difficult to scrape through a trial of strength in the Lok Sabha (LS) even if the LF withdraws support. But the Congress is apparently not keen to rest assured and going ahead with its poll preparations. “We are already in the election year. So it is quite natural that we have to gear up for the polls,” said Mr Moily. The campaign committee is headed by Mrs Gandhi herself with the Minister for External Affairs Pranab Mukherji as the vice-chairman. The Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the union ministers Arjun Singh, A K Antony, P R Dasmunshi, Ambika Soni, Vayalar Ravi, Kamal Nath, Meira Kumar, Shakeel Ahmed Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, S M Krishna, P Chidambaram and senior leaders like Margaret Alva, Ajit Jogi, Digvijay Singh, Salman Khurshid, and G Parameshwar are among the members of the committee. ! User reviews There are no user reviews for this item. To write a review please register or login.