Congress Picks For UP: Sheila Dikshit, 78, Babbar, 64, Sanjay Singh, 64

New Delhi: In cinching its team for the crucial Uttar Pradesh election, the Congress has exhibited no tilt towards new or young leaders, a strategy the party said it intended to embrace after being whited-out in a range of states.

For Chief Minister, the Congress has selected Sheila Dikshit, 78, whose enthusiasm for the nomination has been controlled, to say the least. After initially turning down the job, Ms Dikshit said last week that she would follow her party's wishes, while conceding that she had been left "hurt" by her exclusion from the campaign for the Delhi election in 2015.

Despite her record as three-time Chief Minister of Delhi, Ms Dikshit was benched by the Congress in favour of her long-time rival, Ajay Maken, to take on the might of Arvind Kejriwal and his Aam Aadmi Party. Team Kejriwal scored 67 of 70 seats; three landed with the BJP; and for the Congress, there were none.

Ms Dikshit, sources say, was nudged out of retirement on the unsubtle urging of Prashant Kishor, who was a key strategist of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's colossal victory in 2014. Now annexed to the Congress, Mr Kishor reportedly believes that Ms Dikshit, married into a reputed Brahmin family in Uttar Pradesh, will help lure back the upper caste voters once loyal to the Congress. During her 15 years as Delhi Chief Minister next door to Uttar Pradesh, the capital was considerably modernised; sources say Mr Kishor will leverage this to present her as just enough of an outsider to arouse interest, but well clear of an unknown quantity.

The chief of the Congress' campaign committee will be Sanjay Singh, 64, who is from the former royal family of Amethi, the constituency of party Vice President Rahul Gandhi. Mr Singh, was given a Rajya Sabha seat from Assam as talk swirled of him crossing over to the BJP for a second time (from the late 90s to 2003, he had switched sides).

As a Thakur, Mr Singh is expected to help consolidate the upper caste vote that Mr Kishor is so keen to leverage. He's also seen as someone who holds sway over the party cadres -and who, if slighted, could work considerable damage.

Yesterday, the Congress announced Raj Babbar, 64, as the new head of its Uttar Pradesh branch. His high recall value as a former actor is expected to draw large audiences to rallies, while his status as an Other Backward Caste or OBC leader provides an essential component to the caste calculus. Mr Babbar, once a leader of the Samajwadi Party, joined the Congress in 2008. A year later, riding partly on his star appeal, he defeated Dimple Yadav, the wife of Chief Minister Akhilesh Yadav, to be elected to Parliament.

After being stripped of states like Assam and Kerala, senior Congress leaders declared the need for "surgery", and called for a major organisational overhaul while characteristically avoiding any indictment of Mr Gandhi and his mother Sonia, who is the Congress President. For months, there has been talk that Mr Gandhi, 46, is to be promoted to his mother's post, and will then recast the party's top ranks with younger leaders.

In Uttar Pradesh, however, where the Gandhis were the only Congress MPs to be re-elected, the party has chosen to remain in thrall to veterans.