Rajnath to head BJP’s 27-member poll manifesto panel, Nirmala convener

Tribune News Service

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, March 30

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, the sitting MP from Lucknow, will head a 27-member Lok Sabha manifesto committee of the ruling BJP.

The panel, unveiled on Saturday, has the maximum representation from the battleground state of Uttar Pradesh, which has the highest number of parliamentary seats in India and holds the key to the BJP’s 370-plus goal in a House of 543.

Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who hails from Tamil Nadu, has been appointed convener of the panel and Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal from Maharashtra co-convener.

Max representation from UP

State: No. of members

Uttar Pradesh: 5

Rajasthan, Odisha: 3 each

MP/Bihar/Maharashtra: 2 each

Tamil Nadu, Jharkhand, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, Karnataka, Delhi, Haryana, Kerala: 1 each

UP (80), Tamil Nadu (39) and Maharashtra (48), whose leaders will steer the BJP’s key manifesto drafting exercise, together make up 167 Lok Sabha seats of the 543.

Importantly, while in Madhya Pradesh, both sitting Chief Minister Mohan Yadav and former CM Shivraj Singh Chouhan have found membership in the key committee, in Rajasthan, sitting CM Bhajan Lal Sharma is missing from the list while former CM Vasundhara Raje is there. Raje has not featured in the list of the BJP’s Lok Sabha candidates this season though her son has been re-nominated to contest.

Other union ministers in the committee are Arjun Munda, Bhupender Yadav, Kiren Rijiju, Arjun Ram Meghwal, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Dharmendra Pradhan, Smriti Irani and Rajeev Chandrashekhar.

Chief Ministers of Chhattisgarh (Vishnu Deo Sai), Assam (Himanta Biswa Sarma), Gujarat (Bhupendra Patel) and MP (Mohan Yadav); and former Deputy CM of Bihar Sushil Modi (who has been denied the Lok Sabha ticket) are also in the committee.

Among leaders representing the minorities in the panel are Manjinder Singh Sirsa from Delhi, Anil Antony, son of Congress veteran AK Antony, from Kerala and BJP national vice-president Tariq Mansoor, a former VC of Aligarh Muslim University, from UP. Mansoor represents the dominant backward Pasmanda Muslims.

The five members from UP in the panel are Lucknow MP Rajnath Singh, Amethi MP Smriti Irani, Deputy CM Keshav Prasad Maurya, Radha Mohan Das Agarwal and Tariq Mansoor.

So far as the region goes, Haryana has found representation in the committee through former state unit chief OP Dhankar, recently appointed in-charge of the Lok Sabha poll in Delhi.

In the region, the panel does not have representation from Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, J&K, Ladakh and Chandigarh.

The BJP had earlier launched a nationwide exercise to gather people’s inputs for the manifesto. The committee will put the suggestions together.

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