Jagjivan Ram to be Cong icon

Jagjivan Ram to be Cong icon

FPJ BureauUpdated: Thursday, May 30, 2019, 11:35 AM IST
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New Delhi : At a time Prime Minister Modi is ‘stealing’ the Congress icons – be it Sardar Patel or Babasaheb Ambedkar, the Congress has decided to project former defence minister Jagjivan Ram as its own ‘Dalit’ icon to be played up first in the upcoming Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections and then across the country.

His projection will be not only to win back the ‘Dalit’ vote banks but also use him to counter the BJP’s attempts to capitalise the September 29 surgical strikes in the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir as it was during his tenure as the defence minister of the Indira Gandhi government that India decisively defeated Pakistan in the Bangladesh liberation war in 1971, a top Congress leader said.

Jagjivan Ram’s daughter Meira Kumar, a former Lok Sabha Speaker, has been picked up to head the campaign to influence the Dalit voters in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand from a war room to be set up in Lucknow for managing around a dozen star Dalit campaigners to go around assuring the Dalit that their uplift is possible only in a Congress government.

Though Jagjivan Ram had left the Congress just before the Lok Sabha elections in 1977 to express his disgust over the Emergency clamped by Indira Gandhi, the Congress sources said the party would point out how the Dalit cause at the core of the Congress value system was reflected in Jawaharlal Nehru picking him as the youngest minister in his Cabinet.

Sources said Meira Kumar agreed to be part of the Dalit outreach campaign to be kicked off by Rahul Gandhi in Uttar Pradesh from November 11 that will go on for the next two months, focusing particularly on selected 8,500 villages having more than 50% Dalit population or at least 1,000 Dalits and build up the party cadre by picking up three to six prominent Dalits from among them to work for the party in the elections.

The campaign in Uttar Pradesh includes door-to-door campaign and a day-long “Dalit Sabha” in each of these villages with the help of 200 teams that will fan out to mobilise the people. Rahul will launch the campaign, join some of the rallies and attend the concluding mega rally in Lucknow in January. Similar campaign will also be launched in Punjab to woo the Dalits who constitute more than 50% voters in many Assembly constituencies.

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