Gandhis to hold meet; Congress has a new slogan

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, along with Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, will hold a dialogue with party workers in Lucknow in the last week of July.

The event will be almost like a rally of sorts, with about 60,000 Congress workers attending it. The Congress leaders are expected to give a pep talk to party workers and motivate them to fight the elections with the intention of winning them.

The Congress has coined a slogan, “27 saal UP Behaal”, before launching a campaign against the BJP, Samajwadi Party and BSP, whose regimes in the state have been marked by caste politics, criminalisation and under-development. Top leaders of the party will undertake a “Bus Yatra” from July 23 in four districts which is being viewed as a formal launching of the election campaign.

Addressing a press conference, chairman of the campaign committee of Uttar Pradesh Sanjay Sinh on Thursday said that the three-day yatra would be flagged off by the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi on July 23 at the AICC headquarters in New Delhi.

Congress president Sonia Gandhi is also scheduled to hold a road show in Varanasi, the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the first week of August. Other senior party leaders will also be present at the event.

In another major programme, UPCC president Raj Babbar and the Congress chief ministerial candidate Sheila Dikshit will take the road less travelled and start touring the state. The two leaders will travel by road and will make, at least, one visit to each of the 75 districts.

These leaders will meet people along the way and stop by for small meetings and interactions.

Party sources said that the new UPCC team hopes to mobilise party workers and also get an idea of the mood of the people. In short, they will make an effort to reduce the communication gap between the party and the people.

“These interactions will not be a one-way monologue but a dialogue between the leaders and the people, including workers. The leaders will invite suggestions and ideas from the common man,” said a party leader.

The city and district units will also be involved in this programme though they have been asked not to make any elaborate arrangements for welcome of the new team.

A formal announcement of this programme will be made once it is given the green signal by the party high command. Alongside, the UP Congress has asked all district and city units to send in their panel of names for the 2017 assembly elections. These will be matched with the list of names submitted by independent observers and the names are expected to be finalised in the next one month. The Congress, sources said, wants to maintain the momentum it had achieved when Mr Raj Babbar was appointed UPCC president and Ms Sheila Dikshit was named as the chief ministerial candidate. For the first time the Twitter handle of UPCC was found trending at second position during this time. The three-day yatra, set to begin later this week, will cover 173 km on the first day, which will have Ghaziabad, Hapur and Amroha en route before ending at Murabad. On July 24, it will go to Murabad, Rampur, Bareilly and Shahjahanpur, covering 197 km. On the third day, July 25, it will go to Hardoi, Kannauj and Kanpur, a distance of about 198 km. AICC general secretary in-charge of Uttar Pradesh and leader of the opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Raj Babbar, the Congress’s CM candidate Sheila Dikshit, Dr Sanjay Sinh, chairman of UPCC co-ordination committee, Pramod Tiwari, CLP leader, Pradeep Mathur and others will take part in the yatra, he said. Meanwhile, the AICC on Thursday appointed campaign in-charges for the 18 divisions in UP. They are: Harender Malik (Saharanpur), Harshwardhan Valmiki (Agra), Hasan Arif Ansari (Aligarh), Nand Gopal Gupta Nandi (Allahabad), Ram Bachan Dhuria (Azamgarh), Fazle Masood (Bareilly), Ishwar Chandra Shukla (Basti), Pritam Singh Lodhi (Chitrakoot), Tarun Patel (Devipattan), Gyanendra Pratap Singh (Faziabad), ,Ambika Singh (Gorakhpur), Pradip Jain Aditya (Jhansi), Ram Asrey Prasad (Kanpur), Anu Tandon (Lucknow), Surendra Goyal (Meerut), Rajeshpati Tripathi (Mirzapur), Rashid Alvi (Murabad) and Ajay Rai (Varanasi).