Research agency to draft Congress manifesto for Lok Sabha polls 2014 in Pranab Mukherjee's absence

NEW DELHI: Congress has decided to hire a research agency and look for inputs from corporate bigwigs and industry lobbies to prepare its manifesto for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, a reflection of change in leadership style in the party.


For the last three Lok Sabha elections, the exercise was a oneman show of senior leader Pranab Mukherjee, who moved over to Rashtrapati Bhawan. However, Congress’ manifesto committee for 2014, headed by Defence Minister AK Antony, has decided to change the way it’s framed.

Apart from the usual practice of taking suggestions from the state units, the party has deputed two senior leaders to take the views of the corporate sector. “The leaders would be interacting with corporate bigwigs and even industry lobby groups like FICCI and CII. These inputs would largely be on economy and industry expectations,” said a member of the manifesto committee.

Working on the sugge s t ions of Finance Minister P Chidambaram, Antony’s deputy in the manifesto committee, the party has decided to hire a research agency to give inputs on what should be the points of emphasis for the party, statistics on programme implementation and voter behaviour. The inputs would be used to frame manifesto.

The party is also looking at making the entire document concise. During the initial discussions, committee members felt that even the 21-page document in 2009 could have been shorter. “Nobody reads it in such detail. We should stick to bullet points,” said the member. The party would stress on political agenda, economic development, international affairs, social welfare, programmes for minorities, women and child development in its 2014 document.

Another senior member of the manifesto committee told ET, “We are missing Pranabda. Earlier, it used to be almost his show. He would identify people within the committee and entrust them with writing on different topics like social welfare, economics or minorities. After he got our respective write-ups he would change everything. That was his style, but in the end we used to have a perfect document.” The leader said Mukherjee was the soul of Congress’ manifestoes in the last three Lok Sabha elections.