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Congress should go in for alliances, says Pranab

By Our Special Correspondent

NEW DELHI DEC. 30. The urgent need for the Congress to strike alliances and gear up the party apparatus ahead of the Lok Sabha polls was underlined today by the Pranab Mukherjee Committee, which went into the reasons for the debacle in the recent Assembly polls in the four States and prepare a roadmap for the days ahead.

The committee report submitted today recommended that in preparation for the next general elections and in pursuance of early implementation of the Shimla Sankalp, the Congress should fight the communal and divisive forces. With this end in view, the panel recommended that the work of identifying potential partners and initiating talks with them be taken up "with all deliberate speed." It suggested that, if possible, this should be done preferably within the month of January, so that the alliance could be in place well before the elections.

Noting that the Congress and its potential partners, varied from State to State, the Committee urged that negotiations at multi-state, regional, state or sub-regional level be undertaken within the perspective of a national framework based on a national strategy with national objectives.

The committee made detailed recommendations to gear up the AICC and Pradesh Congress Committees into election mode and inducting professionalism into all dimensions and levels of election work. Aware of the media blitzkrieg that the Bharatiya Janata Party was said to have undertaken during the recent Assembly elections, the committee favoured the use of national and regional satellite channels and even city cable channels for election work.

The committee suggested that the party leaders should be put on alert that they will be held accountable for candidates whose cause they champion. The results from these States as well as Rajasthan, where the party suffered reverses in traditional strongholds of the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes had made the committee recommend that special teams should go into the "set-back'' through the western and central belt. For instance, the party lost many seats in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in the Scheduled Tribes category.

Besides Mr. Mukherjee, the panel included four MPs, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Prithviraj Chavan, B.K. Handique and Priyaranjan Dasmunshi. Talking to correspondents after presenting the report, Mr. Mukherjee said the panel began its task on December 16 and had taken evidence from 57 witnesses drawn from all the States concerned and the AICC office-bearers and observers in charge of these States.

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