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It is a Sunday afternoon. Sitting with two colleagues and scrolling through his social media feed, Amethi district Congress president Pradeep Singhal says he is confident Rahul Gandhi will again contest from the seat. And, five years after he lost the family seat to the BJP’s Smriti Irani, Singhal says: “He will win.”
Facing an uphill battle in the Lok Sabha elections and struggling to win back voter confidence, the Congress Friday came out with its manifesto, announcing a raft of promises to woo the marginalised, such as lifting the 50% cap on quota for SCs, STs and OBCs in addition to reservation in private educational institutions. The party has outlined steps to create jobs, hoping those would strike a chord with the youth, even as it has offered cash doles to women besides pledging to reserve 50% of central government jobs for them.
In his first remarks as he joined the Shinde Shiv Sena after being expelled from the Congress for “indiscipline” and “anti-party statements”, former Mumbai Congress president Sanjay Nirupam hit out at the party, calling it “organisationally disturbed”.
After making the Old Pension Scheme a strong poll pitch ahead of Assembly polls and actually reverting to it in states where it came to power, the Congress party is learnt to have junked the promise of an OPS for government employees in its manifesto for the Lok Sabha elections.
A familiar face for the Congress on television, Gourav Vallabh on Thursday joined the list of leaders leaving the party for the BJP. While the fact that he is not a grass-root leader or an organisational heavyweight means his exit will hurt the Congress more in terms of optics, it’s the issues that he flagged which will cause the party discomfort.
In 2019, the Congress’s first list of candidates for the Lok Sabha elections — 11 from Uttar Pradesh and four from Gujarat — featured both Amethi and Raebareli. Sonia Gandhi and then Congress president Rahul Gandhi contested from their family’s traditional bastions, with the former winning and the latter losing to the BJP’s Smriti Irani. Perhaps aware that his position in Amethi was shaky, Rahul, in a surprise move, also entered the fray from Wayanad in Kerala, a constituency he currently represents.
Biju Janata Dal (BJD) veteran and six-time MP Bhartruhari Mahtab has quit the party and joined the BJP. In his resignation letter, Mahtab, who has been representing the Cuttack seat since 1998, said “things had changed” in the functioning of the Naveen Patnaik-led BJD and that he had been “criticised’ for “raising his voice”.
From Bihar to Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu to Uttar Pradesh, the Opposition INDIA bloc’s partners have either managed to push the Congress to the backfoot in seat sharing negotiations for the Lok Sabha elections, or are trying to do so.