Sonia likely to kick off campaign
PATNA: AICC president Sonia Gandhi is expected to kick off party's election campaign in Bihar from Gandhi Maidan here. The party has pressed into service all its Morchas and cells to make the rally a historic one.
Though the final dates are yet to be decided, she is likely to visit Patna between August 23 and 25. "After over a decade, the Congress is holding its rally at Gandhi Maidan," said state Congress leader and media in-charge Premchand Mishra.
Union minister and Bihar affairs in-charge Mukul Wasnik, who arrived here on Saturday, visited Gandhi Maidan which the party has booked from August 21 to 25.
The state leaders have plunged into the preparation for the rally and all the district chiefs have been directed to mobilize public support and bring them here. State Congress chief Mehboob Ali Qaiser and CLP leader Ashok Kumar will also tour across the state prior to the rally.
There is speculation that some rebel leaders of the JD(U) and RJD will formally join the Congress in Sonia's presence. The names being discussed in the political circles include that of former state JD(U) president Rajiv Ranjan Singh Lalan, who is also MP from Munger, JD(U) MLC Shambhu Saran Srivastava and former Union minister and RJD leader Devendra Prasad Yadav.
The Congress leaders are, however, not very sure about these joinings. "We know several leaders from other parties are keen to join the Congress, but the party leadership is not in a haste to get them in," said Mishra. He added that after the assembly elections there might be a new equation in the state and the regional parties will not be in a strong position here.
Author: TNN
Source: The Times Of India
Showing posts with label Rahul Gandhi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rahul Gandhi. Show all posts
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Rahul vs NaMo in Bihar
Rahul vs NaMo in Bihar
Every sixth Bihari is a Muslim. (On the other hand, every eighth Indian is a Muslim according to the 2001 census, though some in the community argue that it is closer to every seventh Indian. In any case, ten per cent of India’s Muslims are in Bihar.) The Bihar Assembly polls will take place in around three months, and as always, whoever has the best caste/community combination will win. Incumbent Chief Minister Nitish Kumar tried to split the Muslim vote by attacking his Gujarat counterpart Narendra Modi over a minor matter of newspaper ads during the BJP meet in Patna last month. It apparently backfired. The Muslims are now doubly suspicious of Nitish despite his not-inconsiderable achievements of fast-tracking development and improving security; and the upper castes do not look as if they will transfer their votes from the BJP to the JD(U) in constituencies where the latter will fight. Lalu Prasad has gained. After a year of silently suffering the cavalier treatment by his senior UPA partner, he can afford himself a smile. He now has the edge in Bihar.
This has not gone unnoticed by the Congress party which, like Rip Van Winkle, hopes to electorally wake up in Bihar after 20 long years. It is repeatedly said that the Congress cannot ever hope for a parliamentary majority unless it gets substantial numbers of MPs from the Hindi heartland states of UP (80 Lok Sabha seats) and Bihar (40). Bihar, due to Lalu’s dominance for most of the past two decades, seemed a much tougher nut to crack than UP. Rahul Gandhi’s surprising performance in UP in last year’s Lok Sabha elections appears to have given the Congress a ray of hope.
Given the Muslim voter’s importance in the Congress’ traditional electoral strategy, the party not surprisingly last month appointed a relatively young, fresh face as its party chief: Mehboob Ali Kaiser. And then, seeing how Nitish fell flat on his face trying to confuse Muslims by demonising their enemy no. 1, Narendra Modi, the Congress has decided to do one better, and this is perhaps why it aggressively moved the Central Bureau of Investigation against his close associate and Gujarat minister of state for home, Amit Shah. If the CBI summoned Shah, do not assume this is a logical consequence of the investigation of the encounter killing of gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh, which has already led to the arrest of an IPS officer (Gujarat claims Sohrabuddin had terrorist links, much like Dawood Ibrahim). If the CBI acted methodically, Ottavio Quattrocchi would be singing arias in Tihar jail. And saying the investigation was ordered by the Supreme Court is besides the fact; the ruling party can turn up or lower the pressure in CBI cases whenever it chooses. The summons is simply intended to show Bihar’s Muslims that the Congress is their enemy’s enemy; so the Congress deserves their votes.
You may wonder whether this strategy is any good, and the best clue is in how Lalu behaves. His core combination of the Yadavs and Muslims in Bihar has been impregnable; you could argue that hubris is what defeated him in the last Assembly elections. His voter-coalition has survived longer than Mulayam Singh’s in UP because unlike Mulayam, Lalu never betrayed his voters by getting into bed with Kalyan Singh, the man who oversaw the 1992 demolition in Ayodhya. If he feels even slightly unsettled by other politicians’ outreach to Muslims, he will react. The fact that he has not and that after a long year in sulk he finally allows himself an occasional smile should tell you how good the Congress’ strategy is.
There are also rumours that the Congress may try to woo back its traditional Dalit voters by announcing that its chief ministerial candidate will be Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar. (She can safely be a candidate because the likelihood of the Congress taking the lead in forming a government is remote.) Though she is the late Jagjivan Ram’s daughter and also India’s first woman Speaker, these are credentials that impress only middle-class newspaper readers, not rural Dalits. More importantly, Ram Vilas Paswan is well-entrenched as Bihar’s Dalit leader. This rumour will thus remain a fanciful notion.
The only sure hope for the Congress party is Rahul Gandhi. Indeed, with Nitish scoring a self-goal by bickering with his alliance partner, and with Lalu not participating in the central government (a source of patronage for party workers and constituents), you would think this is the best window of opportunity that Rahul and his party have in Bihar. Strangely, the princeling has of late kept a low profile.
Perhaps it has to do with his 40th birthday last month, when the youth icon holidayed abroad to celebrate his metamorphosis into a middle-aged man. Around that time, The Economist wrote a damaging piece about Rahul and the fact that no one knew about this future prime minister’s policy on anything (although many have guessed that Rahul believes Union home minister P Chidambaram to be “intellectually arrogant”, as Digvijay Singh put it). Rahul’s beliefs are so secret that you would need Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Inception to enter his dream and dig them out. And since then, Rahul has not stirred from Delhi, preferring to meet party colleagues from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu at his home. (It is not known if he accompanied his brother-in-law Robert Vadra to South Africa to watch the World Cup final that was won by Spain, a country that apparently has emotional significance for Rahul.)
Rahul has promised to visit Bihar in late August; his mother will be addressing a rally at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan a month from now. Somehow that does not seem to measure up to the kind of effort he put into UP where he did the occasional sleep-over at Dalit homes. This is a chance for Rahul to show that his party is on the comeback trail; selecting fresh candidates will help pick up a bunch of seats; and the time to do so is now. If Rahul is just going to attend a couple of functions here and there, the equally returns will be equally meagre.
And if that’s the case, then the contest will be simply Nitish versus Lalu. With three months to go, Nitish has enough time to make up lost ground. In which case, the results will show that Bihar was not just Nitish’s win, but Rahul’s loss. Rahul may try and chalk it up as one of those losses like Gujarat and UP in 2007 that did not matter in the long run. But if the voters see it differently, then the princeling’s plan to become prime minister (and one unfettered by coalition allies) will, to refer back to Inception, remain a dream-within-a-dream.
Author: Aditya Sinha
Source: New Indian Express
Every sixth Bihari is a Muslim. (On the other hand, every eighth Indian is a Muslim according to the 2001 census, though some in the community argue that it is closer to every seventh Indian. In any case, ten per cent of India’s Muslims are in Bihar.) The Bihar Assembly polls will take place in around three months, and as always, whoever has the best caste/community combination will win. Incumbent Chief Minister Nitish Kumar tried to split the Muslim vote by attacking his Gujarat counterpart Narendra Modi over a minor matter of newspaper ads during the BJP meet in Patna last month. It apparently backfired. The Muslims are now doubly suspicious of Nitish despite his not-inconsiderable achievements of fast-tracking development and improving security; and the upper castes do not look as if they will transfer their votes from the BJP to the JD(U) in constituencies where the latter will fight. Lalu Prasad has gained. After a year of silently suffering the cavalier treatment by his senior UPA partner, he can afford himself a smile. He now has the edge in Bihar.
This has not gone unnoticed by the Congress party which, like Rip Van Winkle, hopes to electorally wake up in Bihar after 20 long years. It is repeatedly said that the Congress cannot ever hope for a parliamentary majority unless it gets substantial numbers of MPs from the Hindi heartland states of UP (80 Lok Sabha seats) and Bihar (40). Bihar, due to Lalu’s dominance for most of the past two decades, seemed a much tougher nut to crack than UP. Rahul Gandhi’s surprising performance in UP in last year’s Lok Sabha elections appears to have given the Congress a ray of hope.
Given the Muslim voter’s importance in the Congress’ traditional electoral strategy, the party not surprisingly last month appointed a relatively young, fresh face as its party chief: Mehboob Ali Kaiser. And then, seeing how Nitish fell flat on his face trying to confuse Muslims by demonising their enemy no. 1, Narendra Modi, the Congress has decided to do one better, and this is perhaps why it aggressively moved the Central Bureau of Investigation against his close associate and Gujarat minister of state for home, Amit Shah. If the CBI summoned Shah, do not assume this is a logical consequence of the investigation of the encounter killing of gangster Sohrabuddin Sheikh, which has already led to the arrest of an IPS officer (Gujarat claims Sohrabuddin had terrorist links, much like Dawood Ibrahim). If the CBI acted methodically, Ottavio Quattrocchi would be singing arias in Tihar jail. And saying the investigation was ordered by the Supreme Court is besides the fact; the ruling party can turn up or lower the pressure in CBI cases whenever it chooses. The summons is simply intended to show Bihar’s Muslims that the Congress is their enemy’s enemy; so the Congress deserves their votes.
You may wonder whether this strategy is any good, and the best clue is in how Lalu behaves. His core combination of the Yadavs and Muslims in Bihar has been impregnable; you could argue that hubris is what defeated him in the last Assembly elections. His voter-coalition has survived longer than Mulayam Singh’s in UP because unlike Mulayam, Lalu never betrayed his voters by getting into bed with Kalyan Singh, the man who oversaw the 1992 demolition in Ayodhya. If he feels even slightly unsettled by other politicians’ outreach to Muslims, he will react. The fact that he has not and that after a long year in sulk he finally allows himself an occasional smile should tell you how good the Congress’ strategy is.
There are also rumours that the Congress may try to woo back its traditional Dalit voters by announcing that its chief ministerial candidate will be Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar. (She can safely be a candidate because the likelihood of the Congress taking the lead in forming a government is remote.) Though she is the late Jagjivan Ram’s daughter and also India’s first woman Speaker, these are credentials that impress only middle-class newspaper readers, not rural Dalits. More importantly, Ram Vilas Paswan is well-entrenched as Bihar’s Dalit leader. This rumour will thus remain a fanciful notion.
The only sure hope for the Congress party is Rahul Gandhi. Indeed, with Nitish scoring a self-goal by bickering with his alliance partner, and with Lalu not participating in the central government (a source of patronage for party workers and constituents), you would think this is the best window of opportunity that Rahul and his party have in Bihar. Strangely, the princeling has of late kept a low profile.
Perhaps it has to do with his 40th birthday last month, when the youth icon holidayed abroad to celebrate his metamorphosis into a middle-aged man. Around that time, The Economist wrote a damaging piece about Rahul and the fact that no one knew about this future prime minister’s policy on anything (although many have guessed that Rahul believes Union home minister P Chidambaram to be “intellectually arrogant”, as Digvijay Singh put it). Rahul’s beliefs are so secret that you would need Leonardo DiCaprio in the film Inception to enter his dream and dig them out. And since then, Rahul has not stirred from Delhi, preferring to meet party colleagues from Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu at his home. (It is not known if he accompanied his brother-in-law Robert Vadra to South Africa to watch the World Cup final that was won by Spain, a country that apparently has emotional significance for Rahul.)
Rahul has promised to visit Bihar in late August; his mother will be addressing a rally at Patna’s Gandhi Maidan a month from now. Somehow that does not seem to measure up to the kind of effort he put into UP where he did the occasional sleep-over at Dalit homes. This is a chance for Rahul to show that his party is on the comeback trail; selecting fresh candidates will help pick up a bunch of seats; and the time to do so is now. If Rahul is just going to attend a couple of functions here and there, the equally returns will be equally meagre.
And if that’s the case, then the contest will be simply Nitish versus Lalu. With three months to go, Nitish has enough time to make up lost ground. In which case, the results will show that Bihar was not just Nitish’s win, but Rahul’s loss. Rahul may try and chalk it up as one of those losses like Gujarat and UP in 2007 that did not matter in the long run. But if the voters see it differently, then the princeling’s plan to become prime minister (and one unfettered by coalition allies) will, to refer back to Inception, remain a dream-within-a-dream.
Author: Aditya Sinha
Source: New Indian Express
Congress gearing up for Bihar polls
Congress gearing up for Bihar polls
NEW DELHI: While its government faces the Opposition heat in Parliament, the Congress seems to be preoccupied with the coming Bihar Assembly polls slated to take place between October and November this year.
Up against formidable forces - high-on-performance Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his predecessor desperate Lalu Prasad bent on retrieving his throne - the Congress is leaving no stones unturned to break into Bihar’s caste conundrum.
Once the ruling party in the state, the Congress is now a marginal presence. It managed to win only nine Assembly and two parliamentary seats in the last two Assembly elections.
But with the ‘young’ general secretary Rahul Gandhi keen on reviving the party’s fortune in the Hindi heartland ‘any which way’, the Congress party is putting its best foot forward to break even in a terrain which has nearly be come alien to its political culture.Realising that it can do little other than vigorously woo the minority voters in the state, the party has sent almost all its Muslim leaders to prepare the ground for Rahul’s road shows that are likely to take place in the second half of August.
One of the party leaders back from camping in Patna for three weeks, however, did not seem too optimistic.
“The general secretary will go, when the need arises and the ground is ready,” he said. In other words, if the going is better than what the party expects, the Rahul-card will be played, not otherwise. The party’s ‘youth icon’, after all, cannot be possibly be exposed to a flop show.
The Congress admittedly has only two options in Bihar to woe the minority community through promises of more Central Government-backed welfare schemes and impress the Dalits by tacitly projecting Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar.
On the first count, being a late-comer in the election scenario it has to match Bihar Chief Minister’s five years of assiduous wooing of the minority community. Kumar’s record is especially tough to match as he has managed to cosy up to the community despite the BJP being part of his government.
The Congress has also come to realise that the RJD chief Lalu’s once-invincible M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) factor is not entirely broken. The other vote bank which the Congress can hope to tap the upper caste is still largely with the BJP.
The Congress only hope is Nitish Kumar. That he would do a ‘Naveen Patnaik on the BJP’. The Congress game plan, therefore, is to make it really tough for Nitish to continue his alliance with the saffron party. And, for this, Gujarat has to play itself out in Bihar.
Author: Santwana Bhattacharya
Source: New Indian Express
NEW DELHI: While its government faces the Opposition heat in Parliament, the Congress seems to be preoccupied with the coming Bihar Assembly polls slated to take place between October and November this year.
Up against formidable forces - high-on-performance Chief Minister Nitish Kumar and his predecessor desperate Lalu Prasad bent on retrieving his throne - the Congress is leaving no stones unturned to break into Bihar’s caste conundrum.
Once the ruling party in the state, the Congress is now a marginal presence. It managed to win only nine Assembly and two parliamentary seats in the last two Assembly elections.
But with the ‘young’ general secretary Rahul Gandhi keen on reviving the party’s fortune in the Hindi heartland ‘any which way’, the Congress party is putting its best foot forward to break even in a terrain which has nearly be come alien to its political culture.Realising that it can do little other than vigorously woo the minority voters in the state, the party has sent almost all its Muslim leaders to prepare the ground for Rahul’s road shows that are likely to take place in the second half of August.
One of the party leaders back from camping in Patna for three weeks, however, did not seem too optimistic.
“The general secretary will go, when the need arises and the ground is ready,” he said. In other words, if the going is better than what the party expects, the Rahul-card will be played, not otherwise. The party’s ‘youth icon’, after all, cannot be possibly be exposed to a flop show.
The Congress admittedly has only two options in Bihar to woe the minority community through promises of more Central Government-backed welfare schemes and impress the Dalits by tacitly projecting Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar.
On the first count, being a late-comer in the election scenario it has to match Bihar Chief Minister’s five years of assiduous wooing of the minority community. Kumar’s record is especially tough to match as he has managed to cosy up to the community despite the BJP being part of his government.
The Congress has also come to realise that the RJD chief Lalu’s once-invincible M-Y (Muslim-Yadav) factor is not entirely broken. The other vote bank which the Congress can hope to tap the upper caste is still largely with the BJP.
The Congress only hope is Nitish Kumar. That he would do a ‘Naveen Patnaik on the BJP’. The Congress game plan, therefore, is to make it really tough for Nitish to continue his alliance with the saffron party. And, for this, Gujarat has to play itself out in Bihar.
Author: Santwana Bhattacharya
Source: New Indian Express
Congress hopes Rahul’s ‘medicine’ will revive party in Bihar
The Congress, which has been out of power in Bihar for the last two decades, is going all out to shake up its own moribund organisation in the State ahead of the Assembly elections slated for October-November this year.
Having decided bravely that it will contest alone in a State where it has just nine MLAs (in a 240-strong Assembly) and two MPs (out of the 40 in the State), it is now making up for lost time by parachuting a host of Central Ministers and party functionaries, and planning commemorative functions at every district headquarters on August 9 (Quit India Day) as part of its 125th anniversary celebrations.
All these activities, the party hopes, will galvanise workers for the public rally in Patna's historic Gandhi Maidan in August-end, to be addressed by party President Sonia Gandhi.
Not finalised
The Congress, sources said, has not finalised the date, but it has booked the maidan between August 21 to 25. Party general-secretary Rahul Gandhi is also expected to campaign extensively in Bihar, sources said.
For party general-secretary Mukul Wasnik — who was given charge of Bihar in early June, along with Mahboob Ali Qaiser who was appointed Bihar Pradesh Congress chief, thus ending months of slanging match between their predecessors, Jagdish Tytler and Anil Sharma — the last seven weeks have been a period of frenzied activity.
“In areas where the Congress was not taken note of, people are beginning to react,” Mr. Wasnik told TheHindu, adding that “now, even [Chief Minister] Nitish Kumar is beginning to react to us.'
He also stressed that he had told party workers to address the “aspirations of the people at the constituency-level, not make repeated trips to Delhi.” Mr. Wasnik said he hoped that the list of party candidates would be ready by early September. The Screening Committee, headed by general-secretary B.K. Hariprasad, was set up last week.
Apart from activating the party machinery, the Congress' efforts seem to be to focus on Central social welfare schemes, while focussing on corruption in the State, especially as the Patna High Court has recently ordered a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) investigation into alleged financial irregularities, a decision the Bihar government has appealed against. The party hopes that in this way it might be able to dent Mr. Kumar's claims of development and good governance.
Allegations
Mr. Wasnik also stressed that Mr. Kumar's allegations of stepmotherly treatment by the Centre was not borne out by the facts. “Nitishji,” he said, “should tell the people of Bihar that while the NDA [National Democratic Alliance] government at the Centre had made available Rs. 3,000 crore for rural development, the UPA [United Progressive Alliance] government provided Rs. 19,000 crore on this front in the last six years.”
Meanwhile on Sunday, the Bihar unit of the Congress got a lift with the former Excise Minister in the Nitish Kumar government, Jamshed Ashraf, joining the party along with the former Janata Dal (Secular) president and the former head of Nationalist Congress Party's Bihar unit. Mr. Ashraf, who was sacked from the State Cabinet and the party in June for raising the issue of the Rs.500-crore scam in the State Excise Department, said, “Nitish Kumar is vying with Lalu Prasad to break the record of corruption in the State.”
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