New Delhi, Mar 20: The all consuming passion that the ongoing India-Pakistan one-day series has elicited in both countries has now come to affect the election process directly, at least for the Congress. After announcing formally that the Congress manifesto for the general elections 2004 will be released by party President Sonia Gandhi on Friday, the date for release has now been postponed to March 22. The reason: after AICC General Secretary Ambika Soni’s announcement that the document would be released on March 19, the party leadership realised that the third one dayer was to be played on that date in Peshawar. The media strategy makers of the party immediately got in touch with Gandhi, informing her about the clash of media interest on that date, clearly aware that following the heavy-scoring but closely-fought first two matches, the whole nation would remain glued to the match throughout the day. “That would leave us with little or no chance of getting proper publicity of the manifesto, especially in the electronic media. Even if the media gives the necessary news space to it, no one would for sure take note of it because of the high interest in the match,” a senior AICC leader said giving the reason for shifting the date for manifesto release. The leadership, in fact, toyed with another date – March 21 – but it was found out that that day too had another match, the fourth one of the series. March 20 was not favoured because the next day being Sunday, the strategy makers believed that there might not be much display to the manifesto related news as many newspapers come out with special Sunday stories. Earlier, the party had announced that the manifesto would be released on March 18, but the delay in completion of the printing of the copies forced the AICC to shift the date initially to the next day. In fact, before it was realised that March 19 was a match day, the party had almost completed the preparations for the release function on that day, with even material to erect a large ‘pandal’ at the AICC headquarters to hold the event had been brought, only to be sent back a few hours later.