All guns go blazing for 2024 polls
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, September 7: Congress with its ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ hit the ground to brace up for the 2024 Lok Sabha elections on Wednesday, while the Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar continued on his whirlwind Opposition outreach after throwing the saffron yokes in the state.
The Indian political fervour is now firmly poll bound, with deep divide between the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and the Opposition staring at an existential crisis.
The southern parts of the country have held afloat the Congress even while the BJP seeks to erase its existence from the northern and western regions.
With the trusted ally in DMK, which is in power in Tamil Nadu, former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi slipped into the saddle for a 35700 kms long yatra that will culminate in Srinagar.
Gandhi held the tricolour in his hand and presented a picture of the Congress determined to wake up to the grave electoral challenges in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. Congress is without a full time president, as Gandhi remains reluctant to hold the post after he quit the position following the decisive loss in the 2019 general elections.
The dissenters in the Congress were missing from the action in Kanyakumari, while the Gandhi loyalists, including Bhupesh Baghel and Ashok Gehlot along with Digvijaya Singh, P Chidambaram and Bhupinder Singh Hooda, stood guards to the march of the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’.
The Congress media head Jairam Ramesh was full of energy, who sought to rekindle the party’s media connect even while Gandhi hit out at the mainstream media for having been compromised.
“Unfortunately, our friends in the media are fully controlled. Everybody understands it but on the television, you’ll never see unemployment or price rise. You’ll only see the image of the Prime Minister,” said Gandhi. He had spoken similar words at the Hall Bold rally at the Ram Lila Ground on Sunday.
The core mantra running during the conversations of the Bihar Chief Minister with the Opposition leaders has been that each political party work to win maximum number of seats and the face of the group will be dealt with later.
So, Kumar met the NCP strongman Sharad Pawar and even the CPI (ML) comrade Dipankar Bhattacharya. With the third day of the meetings, the Bihar Chief Minister has already covered the whole spectrum of the Opposition camp, barring the Trinamool Congress and the YSR Congress. In the election for the post of the Vice President, TMC was the principal villain against the Opposition unity.
The BJP, meanwhile, is also now strategising on ways to win 144 Lok Sabha seats on which the saffron outfit had been struggling in the past in its bid to scale up the organisation’s electoral domination in the national politics.
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