Few days after Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi talked of direct involvement of people to empower the party, the Congress on Friday reached out to the deprived sections in a big way in the party’s General Elections 2014 manifesto-making exercise.
Briefing the media at AICC Headquarters, Union Minister Jairam Ramesh and former Union Minister Ajay Maken said the manifesto will be ready by the first week of February and it will be open for public discussion for the next one and a half months. As the Congress launched the first major consultations for preparing the party’s manifesto for lok Sabha polls, it declared that Gandhi has opened the closed doors of politics by ensuring grassroot participation in policy making.
Gandhi during his interaction with the media on the day of results of assembly polls on December 8 had stated that there is a lot to be learnt in the way of politics being practiced by Aam Admi Party (AAP). Addressing a meeting of Dalits, tribals and OBCs, Gandhi said that politics is so far being done from behind the closed doors and windows and the political process is restricted to some 500 odd people. “It is a narrow elite, which constitutes the political establishment and each party is run by a narrower group,” he said promising to open the system at the first meeting with Dalits, tribals and OBCs.
A highlight of the manifesto meeting was Gandhi’s assurance that the public consultation process was “only the beginning” and that he will work towards opening the processes to develop policy and political representation through allocation tickets to candidates. Refusing to go into post-mortem of assembly results, which concluded recently giving Congress a 4-1 jolt, Ramesh said that he sees it “not as the worst of times” for his party as similar things have happened in past including in 2003.
“You will see it in the coming days how Congress rises to the occasion. I do not see it as our worst of times. 2003 was equally bad. We had lost Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh very narrowly Chhattisgarh and had also lost Mizoram. We were written off by all you. Contrary to all expectations, we came to power,” Ramesh said replying to a volley of questions.