Congress bus begins campaign trip in U.P.

The Congress kick-started its campaign for the coming Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh with party president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi flagging off a three-day bus yatra named “27 Saal UP Behaal” from the party headquarters on Saturday.

Apart from senior party leaders, including its general secretary in-charge Ghulam Nabi Azad, the newly-appointed Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Raj Babbar and the party's chief ministerial candidate Sheila Dikshit will cover 600 km on the bus to deliver their electoral message across the State.

Soon after the flag off, Mr. Rahul Gandhi tweeted: “Join team Congress as we kick off a 3-day bus yatra to highlight failures of successive governments in U.P.”

To reverse the decades of declining vote share in U.P., the party is working toward cultivating Muslim and Brahmin voters and for that matter it pitched Sheila Dixit, a Brahmin, as its Chief Ministerial candidate. In the next two months, the party will hold 27 bus yatras.

“This time people in Uttar Pradesh want development. They see the BJP, the BSP and the Samajwadi Party as parties which create a divide. We want clean politics in Uttar Pradesh and this is our main agenda,” Mr. Azad told reporters.