2014: Rally war gets intense in battle zone Uttar Pradesh

Alka Pande/ Lucknow The country’s biggest electoral battle ground, Uttar Pradesh, is getting ready for a war of political rallies. It is not difficult to decipher why. The road to political power in Delhi passes through the state. The party securing more than half of the 80 parliamentary seats here is guaranteed a good shot at power at the centre. That explains the desperation in all parties to hit the ground early in the state. The process was kick-started by Congress party vice president Rahul Gandhi yesterday with rallies at Rampur and Aligarh. BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi would follow soon. However, that’s only the beginning. For the last one month all major political parties in the state have been busy mapping plans of their leaders’ rallies. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the first off the block announcing nine rallies of Modi – starting from one in Kanpur on 19 October. “The preparations for the rallies were already in place. We had only been waiting for the formal announcement of Modi’s name as the party candidate for prime minister before announcing the dates,” said a senior party leader. [caption id=“attachment_1164655” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Image used for representation only. Reuters[/caption] Interestingly, it was the Samajwadi Party (SP) that was keen to take the lead in this rally war. The party had decided to hold a rally in Yadav’s hometown and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s parliamentary constituency Mainpuri on 5 October. Since the party wanted to score over its rivals, the rally was kept a secret affair. “The party leadership had aimed to surprise everyone by the sudden launch of its election campaign from Mainpuri”, confirms a party insider. However, the ‘surprise rally’ could not take place because the rally ground where the event was to take place got flooded with rain water. The father-son duo had to silently convert the rally into a plantation drive for their much awaited Lion Safari in Etawah. Meanwhile, Rahul Gandhi has become the first to address the electorate in Uttar Pradesh. This was obviously a letdown for the SP, which announced 18 rallies in the state starting from Azamgarh on 29 October, before Rahul could finish his speech at Rampur. “The Congress is not a competition for us. Also, the SP has been organising public meetings ever since it won the assembly elections last year. Party leader Mulayam Singh has been regularly calling meetings of party office-bearers and addressing public meetings and interacting with party workers. He has already set the agenda for the elections, which is to stop the communal forces from coming to power,” explains party spokesperson Rajendra Chowdhary. There’s something common between the SP and the Congress in their choice of venues for initial rallies. The latter selected Rampur and Aligarh – Muslim dominated constituencies; Rampur being the home of the SP’s Musilm face Azam Khan – the former is kicking off at Azamgarh, another constituency with majority Muslim voters. “The SP, the BSP and the Congress have always depended on caste politics but the BJP is focusing on the politics of development. This is the reason why we chose to start from Kanpur which has six parliamentary constituencies with three MPs each from the Congress and the SP. Two of the Congress MPs are ministers as well,” says Vijay Bahadur Pathak, the spokesperson of BJP. BJP has planned nine rallies – first in Kanpur on 19 October and the last in Lucknow on 25 December – the birthday of former prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee. “After Kanpur, the second rally would be in Jhansi (Bundelkhand) on 25 October and then in Bahraich on 8 November. Both the places are important from the political point of view. All parties keep crying for Bundelkhand packages. We will expose what has been done so far by them. Bahraich is a border district and there are problems at the border,” claims Pathak. The grand preparation for the rallies includes the arrangement for video conferencing. Besides, parties follow the principle of vaastu while preparing the stage for their leaders. The BJP has got printed over a lakh cards which are being sent to other party leaders as well as to corporate houses, institutes, bar associations and civil society organisations. The seriousness of the Modi rally could be gauged from the fact that party’s state president Laxmi Kant Bajpai himself is camping in Kanpur to supervise the preparations. Modi’s right hand man and campaign in charge of UP affairs, Amit Shah, is expected to visit the rally ground to take stock of things. Rahul Gandhi is again set to address the electorate on 22 October in Salempur and Hamirpur and the party hopes these events would make a difference. “The media is crying hoarse about Modi but the kind of crowd that gathered to listen to Rahul Gandhi shows that the public is happy with the new legislations that the Congress has brought and is willing to see Congress in power,” says Congress spokesperson Zeeshan Haider. The Bahujan Samaj Party had worked out a different strategy. It had abandoned big political rallies for caste-based bhaichara rallies two months ago. However, after the court banned such rallies, the party is forced to working on a different game plan.