In manifestos: Cong’s tick-all eagerness vs BJP’s cagey confidence, but welfarism is common thread

The two parties announced the documents 10 days apart.

WrittenBy:Anand Vardhan
Date:
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Foreign policy in manifesto fold

The sharply split chambers of national discourse have also taken foreign policy into their fold, with a once prized consensus gradually fading away. This is seen in how the BJP has pitched foreign policy gains while the Congress has tracked the government’s conduct of international relations and highlighted the need to let New Delhi find its “lost” footing in the global order. The spillover of such domestic political acrimony to foreign affairs is one of the more unsavoury bits of political conversations that these manifestos hoped to initiate.

When rescued from the esoteric realms of academic interest, the manifestos of the two principal forces in national politics mirror their respective perches in the country’s polity. Far from being seen as the cliched alternative visions of statecraft and policy, their points of emphasis are formed by their distance from power corridors. 

Congress’s ‘tick-all-boxes’ omnibus sounds keen enough to sound a bit quixotic, while the BJP’s somewhat lowkey and a bit cagey reach-out to voters prefaces a party that is awaiting the renewed task of governing once the polls are over.

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