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Congress vows to revise privatisation, create 10 million jobs

NEW DELHI, Tuesday (AFP) India's main opposition Congress party said it would revise the government's mammoth privatisation programme and promised to create 10 million jobs if voted to power in upcoming elections.

Unveiling her party's six-point manifesto for the parliamentary vote starting April 20, Congress leader Sonia Gandhi, 57, promised to be "accountable to the people."

The manifesto signals the strategy the Congress will adopt to ambush the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People's Party - BJP) and the policies it has followed since it came to power in 1999.

The elections, Gandhi said, offered the "choice of two competing visions of nationalism - one, that of the Congress, which is secularism and opportunities for all and the BJP's narrow and parochial nationalism."

The Congress document pledged to launch a youth employment project to match the BJP's promise to generate 10 million jobs a year.

It also speaks of improved living standards for farmers, legal and social equality for women, a level playing field for entrepreneurs and communal harmony. Gandhi said her party would be transparent in governance.

"We have presented specific ideas which reflect the reality...," she said.

The carnival-like atmosphere at the Congress headquarters did not reflect warnings by political soothsayers that the 119-year-old Congress is in full retreat in the face of the BJP's "Shining India" electoral campaign that analysts say has fired the imagination across urban India.

Gandhi's trusted lieutenant and a former Congress party foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, however, warned that if voted to power, the Congress, which had ruled India for more than four decades, would "revise" the BJP's privatisation programme.

"We have identified our economic policy and those contrary to our policy will be revised.

"For example, the divestment (privatisation) by the BJP is nothing but squandering public wealth and this will be definitely revised," Mukherjee told reporters as his former colleague in the finance ministry, Manmohan Singh, looked on.

Singh, a former World Bank executive, dismantled decades of quasi-socialist insulations from the Indian economy and launched sweeping market reforms in 1991 when Congress was in power.

The BJP has carried out the privatisation of some of the most profitable state-run firms in sectors spanning petroleum, shipping and automobiles despite opposition even from within its own ranks to the dilution of state equity in strategic national companies. It scoffed at the Congress manifesto, saying it had little substance.

"It is high on rhetoric and absolutely low on specifics ... The manifesto also makes it clear that it is for the sake of a single family and the common man is merely an instrument to pursue the privilege of a family," BJP spokesman Arun Jaitley said, referring to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has dominated Indian politics.

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee also launched an attack, saying the Congress failed to achieve in 50 years what the BJP has done in just five.

"What we promised we have fulfilled. In the housing sector alone what the Congress did in 14 years we did in five years," Vajpayee told a poll rally in the northern Indian constituency of Maharajgang.

Vajpayee rejected Gandhi's charge that the BJP sought to divide India along ethnic lines.

"We have no differences between Hindus and Muslims and we promise full security to both. These are just falsehoods being spread to malign our image," the prime minister said.

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