Cots ready as Rahul courts UP

Aditi Tandon

Tribune News Service

Rudrapur (Kushinagar), September 5

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi is all set to play the farmers’ card as he enters the Uttar Pradesh election arena tomorrow for the launch of the most extensive voter outreach campaign of his career, the “kisan mahayatra” from Deoria to Delhi.

To end his party’s 27-year political exile in the poll-bound state, Rahul will sell to UP’s farmers the dream of a blanket debt waiver on the lines of Congress-led UPA’s multicrore bailout for the sector on the 2009 Lok Sabha poll eve.

The waiver had worked for the Congress then and it romped home to victory. Rahul is hoping the same promise will deliver victory for the Congress in UP too.

That explains his plan to launch a month-long farmer outreach from Eastern UP’s Deoria and Rudrapur where debt-ridden sugarcane farmers abound.

On the cards for the launch are “khaat sabhas”, which literally involve sitting with farmers across cots and engaging them on their issues. Local Congress workers have been in high spirits for a week planning for Rahul's show for which 4,000 cots have been arranged across Rudrapur to facilitate engagement with farmers.

Rahul’s promise at the end of the engagement will be, “karza maaf, bijli bill half, MSP ka karo insaaf”, all poll promises that will resonate with the farmers. Across UP, sugar mills are yet to pay Rs 2700 crore farmer’s dues.

Rahul’s yatra, which will traverse 39 districts, 233 Assembly constituencies and 55 Lok Sabha segments, won’t be the sole Congress poll outreach targeting farmers in the state.

To make Rahul's farmer campaign successful, UP Congress has lined up 2.5 lakh workers who will go around the Gandhi scion’s canvassing route in 250 “kisan raths”.

“Each rath will have a bag complete with a farmer’s manifesto of the Congress. Workers will go door to door and engage state’s over two crore farming families on what the party has in mind for them. Signatures of families will be taken on farmers manifesto and receipts given in a mark of Rahul-farmers’ bonding. Our promise will be to deliver the manifesto,” says a source in their team of Congress strategist Prashant Kishor, who is powering Rahul’s inventive campaign.

The idea is to create a buzz where it matters through means that resonate with the poor and to find a counter to SP, BSP and BJP’s caste and religion-based politics.

Many in the Congress are comparing Rahul Gandhi’s kisan mahayatra with his mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi's first road show in UP, where she moved from Bulandshahar to Bagpat talking to farmers and exposing BJP’s Shining India claim.

She drove the Congress to victory in the 2004 General Elections. “At that time, the road show was a new concept. Today khaat sabha is,” says Rajeev Tyagi of Congress who had coordinated Sonia’s 2004 road show in UP. He is now in Rudrapur to coordinate Rahul's campaign.