Rajnath Singh to head BJP manifesto panel for Lok Sabha polls; Arun Jaitley to handle publicity

NEW DELHI: In the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, the BJP has picked up home minister Rajnath Singh to lead its manifesto committee, while finance minister Arun Jaitley will head the publicity and propaganda team of the party. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj will chair the panel that will work on literature creation, while law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad will guide the media team.

BJP chief Amit Shah made the appointments on Sunday, according to a press statement issued by the party.

Rajnath will be assisted by Jaitley, Union ministers Nirmala Sitharaman, Thawar Chand Gehlot, Prasad, Piyush Goyal, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, former MP chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, former Maharashtra CM Narayan Rane, Bihar deputy CM Sushil Modi, his Uttar Pradesh counterpart Keshav Prasad Maurya, BJP general secretaries Ram Madhav and Bhupender Yadav, MP Meenakshi Lekhi, and former Jharkhand chief minister Arjun Munda, among others.


In the 2014 general elections, Murli Manohar Joshi had headed this committee. This year, the manifesto will be called Sankalp Patra.

Jaitley’s publicity and propaganda committee will consist of Goyal, I&B minister Rajyavardhan Rathore, Union minister Mahesh Sharma, general secretary Anil Jain, former Delhi BJP chief Satish Upadhyay, Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar and Rituraj Sinha.

Roads and highways minister Nitin Gadkari will head the social and self-help groups committee, which will comprise BJP general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya, Union ministers Sadanand Gowda, SS Ahluwalia, Shiv Prasad Shukla, Vijay Sampla, and national secretary RP Singh, among others.

Swaraj’s literature creation committee will enjoy the support of BJP vice-presidents Vinay Sahasrabuddhe and Prabhat Jha, Union minister Mahesh Sharma, Lok Sabha chief whip Anurag Thakur, spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi, media department head Anil Baluni, foreign department head Vijay Chauthaiwale, social media head Amit Malviya, Anirban Ganguly, R Balashankar and Shiv Shakti Nath Bakshi.

Prasad, who was the chief spokesperson of the BJP when it was in the opposition, will head the media committee. It will consist of BJP spokespersons and media department team. Party vice-president Shyam Jaju has been made head of the social media panel. The party has been very active on social media but has faced tough competition from Congress in the last few months.

The party has also formed a committee that will deal with reaching out to the beneficiaries of various welfare schemes of the Modi government. It will be headed by Rajya Sabha MP and general secretary Saroj Pande. Other committees include the intellectual meets (to be led by human resource minister Prakash Javadekar), election commission (under Bhupender Yadav), travel (under Avinash Rai Khanna), and party headquarters (headed by general secretary Arun Singh). Arun Singh will also head the Man ki Baat committee that will deal with dissemination of the points made by Modi in his monthly address.