Rahul in Kerala to kickstart campaign for assembly polls
Assembly elections in Kerala are expected to be notified next week; programmes of Congress leader, who is on a four-day visit, include a tractor rally of farmers as part of the ongoing nationwide strike against farm laws
Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, who represents Kerala’s Wayanad constituency in Parliament, arrived in the southern state on Sunday on a four-day tour.
Congress leaders said his tour would kick off the party’s campaign for the state elections expected to be notified next week.
His programmes include a tractor rally of farmers as part of the ongoing nationwide strike against new farm laws that allows greater market access to big corporate houses.
Congress party, now the principal opposition in the state, is out to recapture power that it lost in 2016 to the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led coalition.
The party also needs to fight Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) trying to kick it out from its remaining bastion down south as part of its Congress-free India project.
Modi was in the port city of Kochi last week to inaugurate a host of federally funded bigticket projects.
He also opened three major infrastructure projects and announced new ones worth billions of rupees in the election year.
Congress leaders said they were planning to make Gandhi’s visit a big event with rallies, interaction with people and high-profile visits.
“Hundreds of farmers will participate in the rally to be held in Kalpeta ( Wayanad) on Monday,” VV Prakash, the party’s president in Malappuram district, told Gulf Today.
“Later in the day, he would interact with Adivasis (aborigines) in Nilambur (Malappuram). We hope to repeat the outcome of the 2019 elections here.”
The Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) swept 19 of the 20 seats from Kerala in the 2019 national elections thanks to Gandhi’s presence among other factors.
In the process, it established a lead in 123 of the 140 assembly segments, including seven in the Wayanad parliamentary constituency.
The parliamentary constituency consists of the entire Wayanad district besides parts of Malappuram and Kozhikode worst hit by floods and landslides three years back.
Ahead of his visit, Gandhi shared a video on Twiter showing the dismal condition of homeless victims and asked the state government to rehabilitate them.
Prakash hopes his presence to create “a wave” in the assembly elections too if he leads the campaign from the front though it fared miserably in recent civic polls.
“We have made all the groundwork for that and hope to make wonders with the right candidates,” the leader, who hopes to contest from Nilambur, said.
On Tuesday, Gandhi will address a rally in the state capital here marking the end of a statewide campaign tour of Ramesh Chennithala, the opposition floor leader.
On Wednesday, he also plans to interact with fishers who are on the warpath against the move to allow deep-sea fishing by large vessels despite depleting fish wealth.
Also on Sunday, Utar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath flagged off “Vijaya Yatra” or victory journey, led by the BJP’S state unit chief K Surendran from Kasaragod.
The CPI (M)-led Let Democratic Front (LDF) is currently holding two such journeys, Vikasana Munneta Yatra, from here and the northern district in the opposite direction.
Meanwhile, the federal health ministry directed the state to take strict measures against the spread of coronavirus.
Currently, more than 74 per cent of India’s active COVID-19 cases are in Kerala and Maharashtra.
“In the last four weeks in Kerala, the average weekly cases have fluctuated between a high of 42,000 to a low of 34,800,” the ministry said in a press release.
“Similarly, in the last four weeks, the weekly positivity in Kerala has ranged from 13.9 to 8.9 per cent.”
In Kerala, the district of Alappuzha is a cause of special concern where the weekly positivity rate has increased to 10.7 per cent and cases to 2,833. The federal government has advised states with high infectivity to improve overall testing numbers by focusing on increasing the proportion of RT-PCR tests.