The Hindu : Front Page : Jaitley to head poll strategy panel

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Thursday, Mar 12, 2009
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Front Page

Jaitley to head poll strategy panel

Neena Vyas

Also to steer propaganda committee

Arun Jaitley

NEW DELHI: Bharatiya Janata Party general secretary Arun Jaitley will be to the party’s 2009 Lok Sabha campaign what Pramod Mahajan was to the campaign of 2004. He has been made overall in-charge of the party’s committee for poll strategy as well as the propaganda committee.

Surprise names in the ‘Committee for Strategy’, announced recently, are those of columnist Swapan Dasgupta and two aides of the party’s prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani — his political secretary Sudheendra Kulkarni and private secretary Deepak Chopra. Mr. Chopra’s name, included for the first time in any party committee, also figures as a member of the election propaganda committee while Mr. Kulkarni is the person in-charge of the Advani website.

One view in the party was that Mr. Chopra’s presence in two important committees will ensure that every important decision will be conveyed to Mr. Advani and nothing will be done which he may disapprove of. In short, the view was that with three Advani loyalists in the crucial strategy-making committee — Mr. Dasgupta, Mr. Kulkarni and Mr. Chopra — there would be no room left for any complaint that some things were done which Mr. Advani would have done differently.

Another surprise was that Murlidhar Rao, the former convener of the Swadeshi Jagran Manch (an outfit of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), and now whole time with the BJP, has been given the onerous task of managing the campaign tours of leaders.

Helping Mr. Rao in this job would be Amitabh Sinha, a party leader from Bihar. Since then, Mr. Rao has also been attached to the office of party president Rajnath Singh.

The BJP has also made sure that the voice and wisdom of the RSS is not left out. In the Committee for Strategy headed by Mr. Jaitley, the party’s Rajya Sabha MP Bal Apte and RSS ideologue S. Gurumurthy are also members and some “intellectual” input is to be provided by journalists Balbir Punj and Tarun Vijay.

In the propaganda committee headed by Mr. Jaitley, which will release advertisements, video compact discs and other material related to the election, Siddharth Nath Singh, Piyush Goyal, Mr. Chopra and Shyam Jhajhu are members.

Additional spokespersons

Some additions have also been made to the list of party spokespersons. While Ravi Shankar Prasad continues to head that list and Prakash Javadekar and Rajiv Pratap Rudy remain, others included are Mr. Balbir Punj, Mr. Siddharth Nath Singh and S.S. Ahluwalia, while the media coordination committee is to be headed by Nalin Kohli, who will be helped by Bala Subramaniam, Shrikant Sharma and Sanjay Mayukh.

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