Congress’ manifesto likely to cover all sections, with ‘Nyay Guarantees’ as fulcrum

The Congress party may have made its “Nyay Guarantees” – five promises each for strengthening Yuva, Kisaan, Naari, Shramik, Hissedari – the fulcrum of its Lok Sabha poll campaign, but its election manifesto is expected to include a litany of other assurances for socio-economic welfare, preventing misuse of central probe agencies for “political vendetta”, and “reversing assaults against the Constitution by the BJP over the past 10 years”.

Extensive public consultations

The party’s highest decision-making body, the Congress Working Committee (CWC), met in Delhi on Tuesday (March 19) to approve the Lok Sabha poll manifesto drafted by an intra-party panel headed by former union minister P Chidambaram. The Chidambaram-led committee had, as Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge acknowledged in his opening remarks at Tuesday’s meeting, conducted extensive public consultations across the country to draft the manifesto in order to ensure that the document wasn’t confined to being “an academic one”.

Given that the Congress’s guarantees are certain to be pitted against the BJP’s poll promises, which are already being vociferously hailed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his colleagues as “Modi ki Guarantee”, Kharge also told the CWC members that “guarantees currently being touted by the present government would have the same fate as that of the India Shining slogan of 2004”.

CWC unanimously endorsed Nyay Guarantees

Congress general secretary (organisation) KC Venugopal and the party’s communications department chief Jairam Ramesh told reporters that the three hour-long CWC deliberations ended with members unanimously endorsing the Nyay Guarantees, which were announced by Kharge and Wayanad MP Rahul Gandhi during the course of the latter’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra.

“The meeting we had today was not just for our manifesto but for our 'Nyay Patra'... there were discussions on the agenda of the Congress party for the country. Throughout the 63 days of the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, Rahul Gandhi talked about our Paanch Nyay; our president Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul announced five guarantees each for youth (Yuva), farmers (Kisaan), women (Naari), labour force (Shramik), and participation (Hissedari) – a total of 25 guarantees so that the people of our country can see a Nyay Kaal (era of justice) as opposed to the An-nyay Kaal (era of injustice) of the last 10 years of BJP rule,” Ramesh said.

Ramesh and Venugopal refused to divulge further details about the draft manifesto, stating that these would be shared once the document is released formally. Without revealing the nuances, Ramesh did, however, say that the manifesto would have a “whole section” dedicated to safeguards the Congress would, if voted to power, bring in to prevent misuse of central probe agencies by any government – an issue on which the entire Opposition has repeatedly slammed Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government.

25 Nyay Guarantees

The CWC, Venugopal said, also spent considerable time discussing campaigns through which the party can ensure the electorate is well informed about nuances of the 25 Nyay Guarantees (see details in image below) ahead of the seven-phase Lok Sabha polls scheduled to begin from April 19.

Congress to explore all means for publicity

Starved for funds and aware that its publicity campaigns as well as organisational capabilities severely pale before the BJP’s massive election war chest - as SBI’s disclosures of the Electoral Bond details amply demonstrate - and formidable cadre, the Congress is wary that despite crafting an “exceptionally fine and revolutionary manifesto”, it may not be able to spread its message effectively among voters, a CWC member told The Federal. The CWC member said that the party would explore “all conventional and unconventional means” of disseminating information regarding its manifesto, and details of this publicity blitzkrieg are “in the process of being finalised”.

BV Srinivas, president of the party’s youth wing, the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) and a special invitee to the CWC, told The Federal that “the IYC and all other frontal organisations of the party such as the NSUI, Mahila Congress, Professionals Congress, and Seva Dal are being involved in the manifesto awareness drive”. With 1.8 crore first-time voters added to the electoral rolls for the upcoming Lok Sabha polls and another 19.74 crore voters in the age group of 20 to 29 years, the Congress wants to ensure that its Yuva Nyay guarantees get the maximum publicity.

Door-to-door awareness drives

An equally-aggressive push is also being planned for publicising the promises of enacting a legal guarantee for MSP to farmers, ₹ one lakh per annum financial grant per woman per poor household, doing away with the 50 per cent cap on reservations and, of course, also for the Congress and INDIA bloc’s guarantee of conducting a socio-economic caste census if voted to power.

IYC and NSUI members across the country have been told to conduct “door-to-door awareness drives covering maximum possible households in every constituency” to explain the Congress’s Yuva Nyay guarantees to young voters, Srinivas said. These guarantees include promises of enacting a Right to Apprenticeship law, filling up of 30 lakh vacancies in central government jobs, setting up a 5,000-crore corpus to fund youth-led start-ups, enacting a strong law to curb examination paper leaks, and another legislation for the social security of gig workers.

‘Unemployment biggest challenge in India’

“Unemployment is the biggest challenge facing the country today and not addressing it in the last 10 years has also been Modi’s biggest failure. Our Yuva Nyay guarantees are tailor-made to address this challenge and we have to ensure that voters know not just about these guarantees but also our vision of implementing these so that they are convinced that Congress’s promises are not like Modi’s jumla of giving two crore jobs every year; our promise is well thought-out and implementable,” the IYC chief added.

The party’s Nyay Guarantees have largely been crafted to address specific socio-economic concerns of those sections of the population that the Congress and the BJP have both been assiduously wooing – women, youth voters, Dalits, tribals, and backward castes.

Draft manifesto

There are, however, other aspects of the Congress manifesto, which, per sources, have been drafted to address broader concerns that are caste, gender, and class neutral such as the BJP’s alleged attempts to undermine the Constitution, systemic problems of executive overreach or interference into the realms of the judiciary and other constitutional institutions or persisting problems linked with federalism, including those of devolution of share of taxes to the states by the centre.

Sources privy to the draft manifesto told The Federal that the Chidambaram-led panel has tried to address several such issues in the poll document. The manifesto, it is learnt, includes promises that range from “restoration of statehood for Jammu and Kashmir and grant of special status under the Constitution’s Sixth Schedule for Ladakh” to the long-due “implementation of the Sachar Committee Report” for socio-economic emancipation of India’s Muslims as well as a “re-look at the existing GST regime to make it more fiscally practical as well as consumer-oriented”.

Old pension scheme, scrapping of Agniveer

The manifesto, party insiders said, will also guarantee a national-level reversal from the New Pension Scheme to the Old Pension Scheme - a poll promise that the Congress had made in several assembly polls and also implemented in the handful of states where it was or remains in power. Additionally, scrapping of the controversial Agniveer scheme for short-term recruitment in the armed forces and restoration of the earlier recruitment system for the Army will also be mooted.

The manifesto could also moot “suitable amendments” to the Naari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (women’s reservation bill) to ensure that the 33 per cent quota envisaged for women in Lok Sabha and State Assemblies under the Act is implemented “with immediate effect and with a sub-quota for OBC women” instead of the currently-envisaged roadmap, which has an indeterminate time-line. The manifesto is also expected to suggest changes in – or even scrapping of – some laws passed by the Modi regime over the past decade, which the Congress and the wider Opposition construe either as being brazenly unconstitutional or unfair.

Position on CAA, UCC, simultaneous polls

Similarly, the Congress may also clear or reiterate its stand on some contentious issues, such as the Citizenship Amendment Act, for which rules were notified by the Centre earlier this month, as well as the Modi government’s attempts at rolling out simultaneous Lok Sabha, Assembly, and local body polls, and implementing a Uniform Civil Code.

Sources said the manifesto could also feature some promises, especially those concerning judicial reform and environment conservation, which the party had included in its 2019 poll manifesto - a document that had, at the time, been hailed by several social, economic, and political commentators as being a progressive and liberal blueprint of effective governance. Incidentally, the concept of Nyay too had first featured in the Congress’s 2019 poll manifesto, albeit with a different connotation.

Unlike the current Nyay Patra, which deals with 25 guarantees made under five different “pillars of justice” – or Nyay Stambh, as Ramesh put it – the 2019 version was an acronym for Nyuntam Aay Yojana (NYAY), a ₹6,000 per month minimum income scheme that the Congress had envisioned for the country’s workforce. Though Rahul, who was then the Congress president, had hoped that his party’s promise of NYAY would trump Modi’s popularity at the hustings, the hyper nationalism and Hindutva fury kicked up by the Prime Minister following the Balakot air strikes ended the Congress’s dreams of returning to power as the party won a mere 52 of the Lok Sabha’s 543 seats, a marginal improvement from its all-time low of 44 seats won five years earlier.

Congress’s Nyay Guarantees vs Modi ki Guarantee

Since the 2019 Lok Sabha debacle, the Congress’s electoral fortunes have only continued to slide further down, forcing the party to cede a lot of its ground to its allies in the INDIA coalition for the upcoming polls. With the Congress now preparing to contest its lowest-ever share of seats in the Lok Sabha polls, it remains to be seen whether Rahul’s re-imagination of NYAY 2019 as a five-pronged Nyay Guarantee 2024 will give any buoyancy to his party or if these too would fade away in the cacophony of Modi ki Guarantee.