Congress vs Congress sinking UP campaign

NEW DELHI: It’s not his political opponents, but the Congress vote-catchers who are giving Rahul Gandhi jitters in Uttar Pradesh with their gaffe-a-day routine. As Congress leaders try hard to increase net worth in the party through competitive byte-politics, Rahul’s ‘I’m here-to-work-for-the-people not for power’ campaign may be coming unstuck. Congress leaders campaigning in the state seem to have taken to freestyle wrestling now that original wrestler of Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, has developed a liking for computers and the English language. The arena has been left wide open for Congresswallahs who are trying to outdo each other not so much to win the elections, but to get the most-loyal-to-the-prince crown.

 Take Steel Minister Beni Prasad Verma. During one of his campaigns meetings at Jaunpur, he said the Prime Minister is too old to govern: “Manmohan Singh is 80 years old. In 2014, he would be 82, there is a limit and age to work, under these circumstances Rahulji would be made the Prime Minister.’’ Verma was clearly trying to be one up on Uttar Pradesh  Congress strongman and Coal Minister Sriprakash Jaiswal in Kanpur and Congress MP and Dalit leader P L Punia.

Having got the task of bettering his Lok Sabha performance in Uttar Pradesh—he had delivered eight of the 22 seats in 2009—and succeeding, Beni babu is quite beside himself. Relatively new in the Congress, his need to prove his loyalty to Rahul is certainly more urgent than the old timers. Rahul had allowed him a free hand in candidate selections in eastern UP in the hope that Varma would deliver the Kurmi-Muslim combine to the Congress fold. But then, another outsourced leader P L Punia, with his Dalit votes, threatened to jeopardise the combination.

 Pestered by Punia, a Dalit inductee from the Bahujan Samaj Party, Beni-babu seems to have lost his bearings. He first called Punia, “a Punjabi who has no roots in Uttar Pradesh’’ and then kicked up a row over the prime minister’s age. Congress sources say the internal Beni-Punia battle in the Barabanki-Sitapur-Faizabad-Bahraich belt has already damaged the Congress. Even while wrestling over an emerging votebank, they joined other Congress veterans, like Sriprakash Jaiswal, to pass the loyalty test.

 Given the fact that L.K. Advani has lost no opportunity to accuse Sonia Gandhi of remote controlling Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Jaiswal’s remarks left the Congress with a red face. The party’s spokesperson did not where to hide when asked to clarify the coal minister’s stunning remarks.

 The latest one to catch the foot-in-the-mouth disease is Law Minister Salman Khurshid who has created a brand new image of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Trying to outdo Digvijaya Singh’s Muslim messiah act in Azamgarh, Khurshid told the voters there, “When I showed her the pictures of the Batla House encounter, Soniaji wept bitterly and asked me to go the Prime Minister so that something could be done.’’ Two Muslim youths from Azamgrah had been killed during the Batla encounter and several arrested. An angry Digvijaya has issued a curt denial, “She did no such thing.’’

It’s not just the ministers who are giving the Congress party a red face. The party’s son-in-law Robert Vadra landed in Amethi to lend a helping hand to wife Priyanka, who is desperately trying to win the Assembly seats of her brother’s Lok Sabha constituency—Amethi—for the Congress. Vadra hinted from the seat of his Harley Davidson he is not averse to joining politics either. He even displayed an uncanny eagerness to push Priyanka into politics full-time.