The Congress on Monday sidestepped a suggestion made by poll strategist Prashant Kishor that party vice-president Rahul Gandhi — or his sister Priyanka Gandhi — should be the chief ministerial candidate in Uttar Pradesh, where Assembly elections are due early next year.
Responding to a question on the suggestion, senior party leader Jairam Ramesh said, “Rahul Gandhi is the vice-president of the Congress, he is an MP and we all hope and expect him to become president of the party in 2016.”
This also comes in the wake of reports that Priyanka Vadra had already turned down the suggestion.
Congress sources told The Hindu that Mr. Kishor, who has been hired to help the party fashion its strategy in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, is facing his toughest test in the latter State: the Congress here is expected to come in fourth.
Fighting chanceMr. Kishor had reportedly made a presentation to Mr. Gandhi recently after meetings with party leaders in the State.
In that, he had stressed that only if either of the two siblings was projected as the chief ministerial candidate would it be possible for the Congress to have a fighting chance in U.P.
Privately, too, most Congress leaders dismissed the idea, saying that Mr. Gandhi, due to be elevated as party president, was the prime ministerial candidate. One of these leaders added, “Mr. Kishor had an easy time projecting Narendra Modi, who was already on a winning course; in strategising for Nitish Kumar for whom it was the arithmetic of the grand coalition that worked. In Punjab, he was presented with a personality, Captain Amarinder Singh, to project. But here in U.P., without a face, he is finding it difficult.”
Of course, in 2012, Mr. Gandhi confessed to a group of journalists that he had wanted to be the party’s chief ministerial face in the Assembly election that year, but was not allowed to do so by the party leadership.
