Today in Politics: In the Congress manifesto today, what will the party underline?

The discourse leading up to the polls will now intensify, with political parties beginning to release their manifestos.

Congress party chief Mallikarjun Kharge and former party presidents Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi will unveil its manifesto on Friday. Manoj CG reports that the party could drop its Old Pension Scheme pitch — a promise it had been speaking about for a while — in the manifesto. This is considered a major change as many in the Congress had attributed the 2022 Himachal Pradesh victory to the OPS promise. The party also went on to re-introduce the OPS in Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan, where it won in 2018, and in Himachal after the first meeting of the Cabinet chaired by Chief Minister Sukhvinder Sukhu.

It is also learnt that the manifesto will also likely promise scrapping of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002. The ambit and scope of the law was widened by the Congress-led UPA government and later strengthened by the Narendra Modi-led government through amendments in 2015 and 2019. These amendments had given teeth to the Directorate of Enforcement or ED, which has strengthened its hand under the Modi regime. The scrapping of the PMLA would tie into the Opposition’s protests over the BJP regime’s “misuse” of Central agencies, chief among them the ED.

When the Congress-led UPA was in power in 2009, “criminal conspiracy” under Section 120B of the Indian Penal Code was added to the PMLA’s schedule among various other offences. This has, over the years, allowed the ED to enter any case where a conspiracy is alleged — even if the principal offence is not part of the PMLA schedule. In 2009, the ED also got international jurisdiction as far as tracking laundered money was concerned.

Meanwhile, the CPM, which is