RAHUL GANDHI IS NATURAL CHOICE OF CONGRESS
LUCKNOW: Uttar Pradesh Congress president Raj Babbar on Saturday said Rahul Gandhi was the party’s natural prime ministerial candidate although it’s up to the people to decide who will lead the country after the 2019 general election.
Babbar said next year’s election would not be a vote against any individual. The electorate will be casting their votes “to save the country,” Babbar, an actor-turned-politician, said .
“All political parties, institutions and individuals that love the country will come together to save it,” he said in a session at the Shikhar Samagam, the annual summit organised by Hindi daily Hindustan, a sister publication of the Hindustan Times .
Opposition parties, including the Congress, have broached the formation of a grand alliance to unseat the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in the 2019 election. No individual has yet staked claim to being the prime ministerial face of such a coalition. Speaking at the summit in another session, Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanath trained his guns at Gandhi, saying that people within the Congress were “not willing to accept him as their leader”.
On the likelihood of the Congress ending up as a junior partner in a proposed alliance led by the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party in UP, Babbar said it would be the cement strengthening the alliance.