Congress To Put Sheila Dikshit On A Bus, Wants Sonia Gandhi In Varanasi

Lucknow: Now that it has decided its ensemble cast for Uttar Pradesh, the Congress will launch its campaign for India's largest state today.

Sheila Dikshit, the 78-year-old chief ministerial candidate will board a bus along with Raj Babbar, the actor-turned-politician who's been named the head of the party in Uttar Pradesh, for a 600-kilometre drive to Kanpur. En route, they will stop to interact with party workers.

As its main campaign slogan, the Congress, whose strategy is being assembled by Prashant Kishor, has decided on "27 saal, UP behaal" (27 years of UP in ruins). Sources said the aim is to target not one particular party that has governed Uttar Pradesh, but all governments that have led the state since the Congress was last in charge.  

Mr Kishor, once a member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's team, has chosen to work with the Congress in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.

A week from now, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi will meet with 50,000 party workers in Lucknow, said sources, based on its learning experience from rivals like the BJP, whose well-organised cadres are a primary component of recent electoral triumphs. Mr Gandhi will introduce the team of leaders selected to frontline the UP effort to Congress members and volunteers.

On August 2, Mr Gandhi's mother and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi is likely to hold a roadshow in Varanasi, the constituency of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Congress campaign debuts in a week when Mayawati, a Dalit leader and four-time Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, established her skill and clout as a politician.  The 69-year-old led the opposition's attack against the ruling BJP in parliament over the thrashing of Dalits in Gujarat, the PM's home state, by cow vigilantes, who filmed the beatings and uploaded them on social media.  

On Wednesday, the BJP expelled a senior leader in Uttar Pradesh for six years after a video emerged of him abusing Mayawati with such venomous accusations that all parties rose to her defense in parliament.

In a calm but forceful speech, Mayawati, who lost the last Uttar Pradesh election to the Samajwadi Party, accused the government of failing to protect Dalits. Separately, she accused the Congress of doing the same by failing, as the main opposition party, to hold the government accountable, while claiming to champion the rights of society's weakest.

Dalits make up nearly 20 per cent of Uttar Pradesh's population.  The result of next year's election will be used as an indicator of who will become the next Prime Minister in 2019.