Congress key meet vs Modi’s video conference on Thursday
Ahmedabad: As the Congress braces for a meeting of its key working committee and a massive rally here on Thursday where Priyanka Gandhi will deliver her first public address after being anointed party’s General Secretary, the BJP prepares to match this effort the same day with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s national video conference with lakhs of party workers.
Briefing the media here on Monday, Congress’s Gujarat unit chief Amit Chavda said they had requested party president Rahul Gandhi to convene a meeting of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), the party’s highest decision-making body, in Gujarat and he had agreed.
Rahul Gandhi, his mother and United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and newly-inducted General Secretary for East Uttar Pradesh Priyanka Gandhi and AICC treasurer Ahmed Patel will be present at the meeting.
The meet will be followed by a Jan Sankalp Rally, where Priyanka Gandhi is expected to deliver her maiden public address after being inducted full time into the party affairs. Chief Ministers of all Congress-ruled states would also converge at this mega show of the party.
Determined to ensure the Opposition party does not hog the complete limelight in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s prized home state, the BJP will have Modi addressing lakhs of party workers through video-conferencing across 450 centres in Gujarat under its “Mera Booth Sabse Majboot” programme. Nationally the address will cover 15,000 places.
This will be preceded by the launch of a mass contact programme on Tuesday where 50,000 BJP workers will fan out across areas covered under 50,000 polling booths to propagate the central government’s public welfare schemes.
Announcing this here on Monday, State BJP Spokesman Bharat Pandya said on the same evening “Kamal Deep” event would be held where a lamp would be lighted across 47 lakh homes of party workers and beneficiaries of Central schemes.
The party’s entire top brass in the state would oversee this with Chief Minister Vijay Rupani being stationed at Dehgam and president Jitubhai Vaghani at his home district Bhavnagar. “Similarly, all top leaders have been assigned various locations, ” Pandya said.
Meanwhile, the party’s national general secretary in charge of Gujarat for Lok Sabha elections Om Mathur would arrive here on Tuesday for a four-day visit up to March 1.
While Prime Minister Modi’s national video conference would begin at 12.30 pm on Thursday, Chavda informed that Congress’s Sankalp Rally at Trimandir in Adalaj, located between Gujarat’s political capital Gandhinagar and commercial capital Ahmedabad, would start from 3 pm after the all-importamt CWC meeting.