Ahead of five Assembly polls and Lok Sabha elections next year, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Saturday appointed former Finance Minister P Chidambaram as the Chairman of the Manifesto Committee and Rajeev Gowda as the convener; former Defence Minister AK Antony as the Chairman of Coordination Committee and Jairam Ramesh as the convener and former Commerce Minister Anand Sharma as the Chairman of the Publicity committee and Pawan Khera as the convener. Last month, the Congress had formed three committees - a core group committee, manifesto and publicity committee ahead of the upcoming Lok Sabha elections in 2019.
The committees will play a major role as they will define major strategies for the general election. Most of the senior Congress leaders are part of the committees.
The core member committee has the big guns of the party - AK Antony, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Ashok Gehlot, Mallikarjun Kharge, Ahmed Patel, Jairam Ramesh, P Chidambaram, Randeep Surjewala and KC Venugopal.
The 19-member Manifesto committee also includes Jairam Ramesh, Salman Khurshid, Manpreet Singh Badal, Shashi Tharoor, Sushmita Dev, Rajeev Gowda, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Sachin Rao, Lalitesh Tripathi, Bindu Krishnan, Raghuveer Meena, Meenakshi Natarajan, Balchandra Mungekar, Rajni Patil, Mukul Sangma and Sam Pitroda. The publicity committee has a mix of the senior leaders and the young party leaders - Anand Sharma, Surjewala, Manish Tiwari, Pramod Tiwari, Rajeev Shukla, Divya Spandana, Milind Deora, Bhakta Charan Dass, Jaiveer Shergill, Pawan Khera, Kumar Ketkar, VD Satheesan and Praveen Chakravarty. Earlier, announcing the formation of these committees, AICC General Secretary Ashok Gehlot had said with the constitution of these panels, the party is in election mode and will start the work of putting up a manifesto and draw strategy for publicity and coordination.
The Congress president also appointed office bearers, executive committee and five district congress committee chief of Chhattisgarh. The Congress also appointed state coordinators for Odisham West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Goa, Haryana, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha.
Earlier, Congress president had on Friday cleared the appointment of nine new AICC secretaries and a screening committee for poll-bound Telangana. Senior Congress leader Bhakt Charan Dass is the chairperson of Telangana Screening committee, while Jothimani Sennimalai and Sharmistha Mukherjee have been made members of the panel.