Rajkot:
In the midst of a raging controversy over Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi's remarks against her, Congress President Sonia Gandhi will arrive in the state today to launch her party's campaign for the upcoming assembly polls.
Mrs Gandhi is scheduled to address a farmers' convention at the Race Course ground in Rajkot today. Elaborate security arrangements are in place in the city ahead of her visit. A team from the Special Protection Group, which arrived on Monday, has already conducted security checks at the places that the Congress President is expected to visit, a senior police official said.
"As many as 1,000 policemen have been deployed at the venue as well as on the roads that Gandhi would pass through to visit various places in the city," the official said.
"Sonia Gandhi will arrive around 10.30 am and go straight to 'Gandhi-Smruti', the place where Mahatma Gandhi
ji stayed during his school days," a Congress leader said.
According to Gujarat Congress chief Arjun Modhvadiya, Mrs Gandhi would also visit Ramkrishna Ashram and Bal Bhavan before addressing the gathering.
The visit interestingly comes at a time when Chief Minister Narendra Modi has trained his guns on Mrs Gandhi over the expenditure incurred on her foreign travel. Mr Modi had quoted a vernacular daily to allege that the almost Rs 1,900 crore were spent by the government for the Congress President's foreign trips. But after his allegations were countered by an RTI activist who had solicited the information on Mrs Gandhi, Mr Modi changed tack to demand an explanation from the Congress over why the party had not shred details of their president's expenses.
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(With PTI inputs)