Amethi: Rahul Gandhi will be the Prime Minister if Congress comes to power in the upcoming elections, his sister and party leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has said in the first such declaration by a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family.
She made the statement while campaigning for Rahul Gandhi in Amethi. “We will win this (2019) Lok Sabha election and Rahul will become PM,” Priyanka Gandhi told Congress workers.
The opposition bloc has been largely fragmented on backing the Congress chief as the prime ministerial candidate if it forms the government, and Rahul Gandhi, too, has till now not shared his ambitions, and only said “that he does not have these visions for himself”.
While some opposition leaders like DMK’s MK Stalin, RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav and JD(S)’s Deve Gowda and HD Kumaraswamy have proclaimed they would like to see Gandhi as the PM, others like Mamata Banerjee and Sharad Pawar have not given support so far.
Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress has said any decision on a prime ministerial candidate should be taken at a meeting of opposition parties after the general election results. Sharad Pawar’s NCP, too, said there was no need for an immediate debate on the PM candidate. "The Congress itself has declared that it will be decided after the election results," NCP national spokesperson Nawab Malik had said.
The Congress, too, has not taken an official stand on the issue. Senior Congress leader P Chidambaram had earlier maintained that the party never "officially" said its president Rahul Gandhi should be the prime minister if an opposition alliance formed the next government.
The decision on who would be the prime minister in the event of an opposition alliance winning next year's Lok Sabha poll will be taken by its constituents, he had said.
Priyanka Gandhi, who arrived on a two-day visit of Amethi and Rae Bareli to galvanise grassroots workers for the Lok Sabha elections, also spoke about ‘Mission UP’ at closed-door interactions with party workers.
“Rahul has given me the task of forming the Congress government in the next assembly elections in the state. You have seen me working till 4 am. I will work harder to accomplish this task,” a worker quoted Priyanka as telling the Congress party’s workers.
She also asked party workers to reach out to the villages and expose what she called was the BJP's "jumlebazi" or empty rhetoric. According to sources, she remained closeted with representatives of Amethi for around two hours at the A H Inter College in Musafirkhana.
Clad in a blue cotton sari, microphone in her hand, the Congress leader took centre stage among local leaders, taking feedback from them. The Amethi constituency has long remained a Congress stronghold.
Party workers who attended the meeting, later said, Priyanka Gandhi patiently heard ways to effectively reach out to the party's booth level. Till we take the failures of the government to the people, they will not come to know the reality of this government, she told workers.
Speaking on BJP nominee Smriti Irani being pitted against her brother, Priyanka Gandhi said the union minister comes to Amethi for "time pass" as she had nothing to do with the constituency whereas she herself had been coming here since childhood with her father.
Priyanka Gandhi, who had undertaken a river route to visit some riverine constituencies earlier this month, said on her visit to Varanasi she had found no development work had taken place and the people were very unhappy.
Priyanka Gandhi will be interacting with the booth level presidents of four more assembly constituencies holding a direct conversation with them and passing on vital inputs in preparation for the coming polls before taking a night halt at Rae Bareli where she will hold similar meetings tomorrow. She is scheduled to visit Ayodhya on Friday.
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