By IANS
New Delhi : With a year and a half to go for the next general elections, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Tuesday declared itself in election mode and gave party leader Sushma Swaraj the task of coordinating election related activities in the party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA.
The BJP is also commencing from Jan 15 a series of poll-related activities, including public rallies, in all states to make itself battle ready.
Addressing newspersons, Swaraj said that the party’s prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani had assigned her the task of coordinating election activities in the NDA, besides NDA convenor George Fernandes.
In reply to a question, she said Janata Dal-United (JD-U) president Sharad Yadav and Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar had given the BJP the go-ahead in this.
Advani has set up a series of committees that will function as parallel bodies within the BJP “to coordinate election related work”, she explained.
Heading the committees will be a 19-member Central Election Management Committee (CEMC), led by party president Rajnath Singh and consisting of almost all important party leaders. These include Jaswant Singh, Murli Manohar Joshi, M. Venkaiah Naidu, Sushma Swaraj, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, Bal Apte, Arun Jaitley, Ananth Kumar, Goipnath Munde, Thawarachand Gehlot, Vinay Katiyar, Yashwant Sinha, Ram Lal, Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Arun Shourie, Ravishankar Prasad, Balbir Punj and Vinay Sahasrabuddhe.
On Dec 29, a day after the BJP won Himachal Pradesh, Advani held a strategy session at his residence to discuss future election plans.
At the end of this session, also attended by Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, Advani formed a five-member committee headed by Swaraj with Arun Jaitley, Arun Shourie, Ananth Kumar and Sahsrabuddhe to prepare a report on the subject.
Shourie kept out of this due to some other pending preoccupation, said Swaraj.
“On Jan 2, we, minus Shourie, sat to chalk out the action plan and then prepared a report containing the new plan.”
On Monday night, she handed over a copy of the report to Rajnath Singh and another to Advani.
“Our first recommendation is to get into the election mode without any further delay,” she said. The committee’s all reomme4ndations have been accepted, she added.
“For this, the CEMC is meeting here on Jan 15. Within a week of this, we have invited the NDA chief ministers, party chiefs, their Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha leaders and whoever else they want to bring along,” said Swaraj, adding, “This meeting could take place anywhere between Jan 22 and 25.”
“Even though the party high command is fully active and is already in election mode, we need to imbibe the same spirit right down to the polling booth level. And therefore within a fortnight after the Delhi meeting, the BJP CEMC would also hold similar meetings in state capitals,” said Swaraj, indicating that similar committees would be set up down to the state and even district level.
“Ananth Kumar has been delegated the responsibility of organizing public rallies throughout the country in each state, and this programme should complete before March-end,” Swaraj said.