The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Saturday said that Defence Minister Rajnath Singh will be the Chairman of its election manifesto committee for the Lok Sabha elections 2024.

While Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will be the convenor of the election manifesto committee, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal will act as the co-convenor.

The 27-member panel for the elections also comprises about a dozen union ministers, four chief ministers and a deputy chief minister.

The committee members also include Anil Anthony, son of Congress leader A K Anthony and Tariq Mansoor, the former VC of Aligarh Muslim University. Former Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan and ex Rajasthan chief Minister Vasundhara Raje are also part of the committee.

Rajnath Singh, a former party president, also headed the panel during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. Besides Singh, Sitharaman and Goyal, union ministers Dharmendra Pradhan, Ashwini Vaishnaw, Bhupender Yadav, Kiren Rijiju, Arjun Munda, Arjun Ram Meghwal, Smriti Irani and Rajeev Chandrasekhar are also its members.

Chief Ministers of Assam, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Gujarat as well as Deputy Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Keshav Prasad Maurya also part of the committee.

Other members include senior leaders Sushil Kumar Modi, Ravi Shankar Prasad and former Union minister Jual Oram as well as BJP’s organisational leaders such as Vinod Tawde, O P Dhankar, Radha Mohan Das Agrawal and Manjinder Singh Sirsa.

BJP leaders such as Prasad, Sitharaman, Goyal, Modi, Chouhan and Maurya were also part of the 2019 election manifesto committee.

Elections to the 18th Lok Sabha are scheduled to be held in seven phases, beginning April 19 to June 1, in which around 97 crore voters will cast their ballot through 10.5 lakh polling stations. Around 1.8 crore voters, which include 83.5 lakh women, will cast their vote for the first time in 2024.

BJP will release the manifesto before the first phase of the election on April 19.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, BJP conceived its election manifesto with the aid of about 7,700 suggestion boxes, 300 rath, over 100 dialogue programmes, over 4,000 ‘Bharat Ke Man Ki Baat’ programmes and through social media.

The manifesto included abrogation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, construction of a temple for Lord Ram in Ayodhya, doubling of farmers income, Citizenship Amendment Act, and Uniform Civil Code.

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