Congress will formally launch its Uttar Pradesh Assembly election campaign with the slogan "27 saal, UP behaal (27 year but UP in dire straits)" on Saturday.
Congress president Sonia Gandhi will flag off a bus yatra from the party office in Delhi in the presence of newly-appointed Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Raj Babbar, party's CM candidate Sheila Dikshit and the AICC general secretary for UP, Ghulam Nabi Azad.
The party's aims to highlight the 27 years of poor governance since it lost power in the 1989 state elections to the now-defunct Janata Dal.
Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav, then a Janata Dal leader, took over the reins of the state from Narayan Dutt Tiwari of the Congress after the party’s rout in 1989.
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, too, will join the campaign on July 29 in Lucknow where he will meet 50,000 party karyakartas (workers). Sonia, too, will undertake a road show in Varanasi, the Lok Sabha constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on August 2.
Congress leaders say the campaign aims to target the last 27 years of non-Congress rule in the state as a period during which the state slipped backwards and was left behind in the development race due to the caste and communal politics of the Samajwadi Party, Bahujan Samaj Party and Bharatiya Janata Party.
They point out that the party will target all its three rivals with equal vigour and present before the electorate statistics to show how the state failed to develop in the last 27 years.
There will be 27 more bus yatras in the next 45-60 days. The first yatra will cover the districts from Delhi to Kanpur. It will cover four districts each day with the bus moving from Delhi to Ghaziabad followed by Hapur, Amroha and Moradabad on the first day.
It will then travel to Shahjahanpur, Rampur and Bareilly and on the third day it will cover Hardoi, Kannauj and finally end the yatra at Kanpur.
Uttar Pradesh will go to polls in early 2017. In the 2012 elections, the Akhilesh Yadav-led Samajwadi Party secured a simple majority in the 403-member Assembly winning 224 seats with the BSP and BJP bagging 80 and 47 constituencies respectively. The Congress finished a distant fourth with only 28 MLAs.
Comments
0 comment