Cong reaches out to its forgotten leaders
The Congress in Uttar Pradesh has decided to go back in time to start moving ahead in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
UPCC president Raj Babbar has quietly launched a campaign to reconnect with those leaders, especially from student politics, who have been relegated to the wings in recent years.
Mr Babbar has been contacting these leaders and asking them to join the party’s Jan Andolan, a renewed effort to revive the Congress in the state. The campaign started with the appointment of ex-Youth Congress president Swayam Prakash Goswami as head of the Jan Andolan Committee.
Mr Goswami has been sidelined for the past oneand-a-half decades and the young generation of Congress workers are not even familiar with him.
“This is just the beginning. Mr Babbar is contacting all those party leaders, particularly former student leaders, who have ceased to be active in party affairs. Whether it is Pradeeep Biswas, Pramod Tyagi, Ramesh Srivastava, Saroj Tiwari or Raghunath Dwiwedi — all of them have been contacted by the UPCC president and asked to get involved in the party’s revival campaign that focuses on farmers,” said UPCC spokesman Dujendra Tripathi.
Three former NSUI chiefs — Rehan Ahmad, Subodh Srivastava and Raghvendra Narain — are also being brought back into the party mainstream. Mr Babbar recently asked former Lucknow University student leader Ramendra Jenwar to accompany him to Hamirpur where a farmer had committed suicide.
Mr Babbar who is currently interacting with farmers across the state said, “We firmly believe that once a Congressman, always a Congressman. Some of our colleagues who had slipped into semiretirement are being contacted and brought back. We need party men who are committed to the party ideology and if we all make a collective effort, there is no reason why the Congress cannot bounce back. Within three months, disillusionment is already setting in with the Yogi government and we only need to reach out to people.”