The politics behind BJP, Congress asking voters to frame their manifestos

BJP to set up 7,500 suggestion boxes, send 300 vehicles with computer tablets across the country as part of its manifesto drafting exercise

It is not new for political parties in India to consult stakeholders and experts to help draft their respective election manifestos. The interesting development in recent years is to use the exercise to reach out to the public at large to give them a sense of being a part of the drafting process and galvanise party workers in the process. 

Most famously, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) experimented with this, and quite successfully, in the Delhi Assembly polls of 2013 and 2015. It crowdsourced not just funding, but also ideas for its manifesto. The AAP came out with not just one manifesto for the entire state of Delhi, but manifestos specific to each of the 70 Assembly constituencies of Delhi, and subsequently for all its 272 municipal wards.

This had an additional benefit for the AAP, which was a nascent political party then, to identify potential political workers in each constituency. The fact that people contributed with ideas and money helped AAP believe that they have invested in the party, and would continue to support it.

On Sunday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) launched its manifesto drafting exercise. The BJP announced that it would set up 7,500 suggestions boxes across the country, and 300 vehicles with computer tablets will travel across the country. It asked all party members, an estimated 90 to 100 million, to reach out to at least 100 million households in the country. While that figure of the number of party workers is considered inflated by the party itself, it will help the BJP galvanise its workers to be in poll mode. 

The party leadership expects workers to take the message of the recent announcements in the Budget for farmers and the middle class and the Modi government's move of 10 per cent quota in jobs and education to the people. The BJP is keen to neutralise the recent Opposition criticism of demonetisation and goods and services tax (GST) having destroyed jobs, and the Modi government having done little to address farm distress. 

Last month, Congress also launched its manifesto drafting exercise. It has asked its youth organisations, including the Youth Congress and National Students Union of India, to crowdsource suggestions for the party's manifesto. It has asked the public at large to email and WhatsApp their suggestions.

The Congress consulted a large number of stakeholders to draft its manifesto for the Gujarat Assembly polls, and subsequently its manifestos for the Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan Assembly polls. The Congress' focus has been to consult activists, non-governmental organisations, and traders' bodies, etc. In Chhattisgarh, the Congress claimed to have consulted over 200 such networks. In Gujarat, party leader Sam Pitroda and Madhusudan Mistry led the exercise. Pitroda met a large number of people in the run-up to the Gujarat Assembly polls.

Significantly, and with the Narendra Modi government facing farmers' ire, BJP chief Amit Shah appointed Home Minister Rajnath Singh the head of the manifesto drafting committee. Singh was once part of the 'jodi number 1' that the BJP had projected in the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, but has since been largely ignored. The other half of that 'jodi' was obviously Narendra Modi. Now with the 2019 Lok Sabha polls on the anvil, Singh is back in favour.

The move to accommodate Singh also has another symbolism. Singh was the agriculture minister in the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. Unlike Modi, Shah and most other top-ranking BJP leaders, including Arun Jaitley and Nitin Gadkari, Singh is someone who can claim to have done farming himself, as he pointed out during the launch on Sunday morning.