New Delhi: Former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi has asked the Gujarat unit to go to the villages and start preparations on all the 26 Lok Sabha seats in the state. According to party insiders, Rahul Gandhi will review the Lok Sabha poll preparations along with party chief Mallikarjun Kharge and the All India Congress Comiittee and state teams by the end of August. Before that, a state team meeting will take place on August 16.
“Our main aim is to re-strengthen the party in the state. We will review the upcoming programs and the party organization on August 16. All senior state leaders will attend the meeting in Ahmedabad,” Gujarat unit chief of Congress Shakti Sinh Gohil told ETV Bharat.
The directive from the central leadership has come in the wake of recent internal reports that the vote share of the rival Aam Aadmi Party, which dented the Congress, has reduced by half over the past months. In the 2022 Gujarat assembly polls, AAP won 5 seats in the House of 182 members by taking away 13 per cent of the Congress vote share.
“Now they are not that strong, most of our vote bank which had shifted to AAP is back over the past months. They just have 5 or 6 per cent effective vote share on the ground,” Congress Legislative Party leader in Gujarat Amit Chavda said. Immediately after the Assembly polls, the Congress blamed the AAP for playing the BJP's game to dent the grand old party.
However, over the past weeks, both the Congress and the AAP have come under the larger opposition alliance INDIA to fight the BJP in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls together. Like in Delhi and Punjab, where the AAP has grown at the cost of the Congress, seat sharing is a tricky issue for the grand old party in Gujarat also.
“A national alliance has been formed but the seat-sharing decision will be taken by the high command. The high command will decide what are the modalities of seat sharing. That will be known later. But we can’t wait till then. We have to start our preparations for the Lok Sabha elections,” said Chavda.
“The August 16 meeting will discuss our ongoing block-level program 'Jan Manch' where we listen to the administrative problems of the locals and try to resolve them. We are getting very good responses. Our coming program to go to the villages will also be discussed,” he said. According to the Congress insiders, Gujarat is a special state for the high command as it is the home state of both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah.
Therefore, the Opposition party is determined not to let the BJP win all the 26 Lok Sabha seats in Gujarat as in 2019 and plans to put up a tough fight in at least half the constituencies. In the past polls, the Congress had won up to 11 Lok Sabha seats in the western state and wants to repeat the same performance next year, the party insiders said.
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