With the second meeting of the Central Election Committee of the Congress on Thursday, the party is likely to seal the fate of another set of 100 lok Sabha contestants.Sources said that the party would together announce about 200 lok Sabha seats by March first week including 90 seats decided in the first CEC and about 15 primaries.
Besides, in the wake of reports of election dates to be announced in the next few days, the party has convened the first meeting of the Campaign Committee chaired by party Vice President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday to put the election campaign on a more aggressive mode.
Candidates on non-Congress held seats from Gujarat, Rajasthan, MP, Maharashtra, Punjab and some of the North-Eastern states are likely to be decided by the Rahul-led team in the CEC.
The Congress last week finalised its first list of candidates but kept its cards close to its chest to ward off any controversies during the Parliament Session. The CEC decided upon 90 names with the maximum from UP and other four States — Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Jharkhand.
After launching “primaries” project in New Delhi lok Sabha constituency represented by Ajay Maken, the Congress initiated the new candidate selection process in Northeast Delhi lok Sabha seat from where
Jai Prakash Agarwal is the MP. Party sources said that on March 6, voting will be held for New Delhi lok Sabha constituency and results will also be announced on the same day.
The campaign committee meeting is to discuss about the internal feedback survey conducted by the party which gave “adverse” reports to the publicity campaign of Congress when compared specifically to the Bharat Nirman campaign of UPA Government.
The party’s war room which has been monitoring Rahul’s campaign did an internal survey for over for three weeks and expressed concerned with the low impact.