New Delhi : Senior Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi is set to enter the Gujarat poll campaign for the first time and will take on PM Modi in his home state on April 27 when she will address a rally in support of party’s Valsad candidate Anant Patel.
“Priyanka Gandhi will address a rally in Valsad on April 27. It is a Tribal hub. Our candidate Anant Patel has a strong chance of winning the seat,” AICC secretary in charge of Gujarat BM Sandeep Kumar told ETV Bharat.
Gujarat has 26 Lok Sabha seats. As the BJP candidate in Surat Mukesh Dalal has been declared elected unopposed, polling in the remaining 25 seats will be held on May 7. The result would be out on June 4.
The Congress has blamed the BJP for the rejection of nomination of the grand old party’s Surat candidate Nilesh Kumbhani, who is missing over the past few days amidst reports that he may join the BJP. The other four independent candidates in Surat had also withdrawn from the contest paving the way for the BJP nominee.
Priyanka’s visit comes in the backdrop of the Surat fiasco which has been dubbed by the party as ‘murder of democracy’ by the BJP. Party leaders now expect her to take on PM Modi in his home state a day after she hit back at PM’s ‘Mangalsootra’ jibe on April 23.
The PM had alleged that the Congress would even take the ‘Mangalsootra’ of women to redistribute wealth to the poor. To this Priyanka hit back saying her mother Sonia Gandhi’s ‘Mangalsootra’ had been sacrificed for the country, a reference to her late father and former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi who was killed in a suicide bomb attack in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperumbudur on May 21, 1991.
“She is certainly going to take on the PM and the BJP in her Valsad rally. What the BJP did in Surat is like stealing the mandate,” said Sandeep Kumar.
In the previous national polls in 2014 and 2019, the BJP had won all the 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat. After losing the 2022 assembly polls, the Congress-AAP alliance is trying hard to stop the saffron party from performing a hattrick.