NEW DELHI : Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi has chalked out his campaign tour of Punjab for two days on January 27 and 29, followed by a day’s campaign in Goa. Both the states are the first to go for the Assembly polls on February 4.
Party President Sonia Gandhi is one of the 40 star campaigners notified by the Congress for Punjab and Goa, but sources at her 10 Janpath residence said she won’t campaign in the two states. Her daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra figures in the list of the star campaigners in Uttar Pradesh, indicating that she may campaign in other parts of the state besides the usual Rai Barelly and Amethi constituencies of Sonia and Rahul.
The Congress leaders are upset over reports from Punjab indicating that their party may finish third while Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) of Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal may win the highest number of seats though less than a clear majority. In contrast, the internal reports of the Congress from Goa indicate that the AAP may not cut much ice in the state while the Congress will have neck-and-neck fight with the ruling BJP in the state.
While the Congress has lined up all senior leaders from across the country for campaigning in Goa, its star campaigner list also includes the local leaders like former CMs Pratap Sing Rane, Luizinho Faleiro and Digambar Kamat as also former union ministers Eduardo Faleiro and Ramakant Khalap besides Rajya Sabha MP Shantaram Naik,M K Shaikh, Pramod Salgaocar and Chandrakaht Kavalekar.
In case of Uttarakhand, neither Congress nor BJP figure in the list of star campaigners while Shiv Sena has given a list of 20 led by Udhav Thackeray and son Aditya, and the Nationalist Congress Party has 31 star campaigners led by Sharad Pawar, his MP daughter Supriya Sule and its general secretary Praful Patel, Tariq Anwar and D P Tripathi.
