If crowd is a benchmark of popularity, Rahul Gandhi stole the show over BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi by several notches at Kanker on Friday.
Creating a flutter in the BJP camp, Rahul’s rally, aided by the presence of wily tribal leader Ajit Jogi, managed to pull at least three times the size of crowd that had come to hear Modi on Thursday.
Congress had planned its strategy well. While it kept Jogi to hit back at Modi and BJP, Rahul Gandhi was there to talk about development policies of the Congress government at the Centre, especially with regard to tribal and land rights, employment guarantee, food security and other schemes targeted at the poor, youth and women. The strategy succeeded pitting Jogi against Modi and leaving as the Messiah of poor.
Braving sharp sun, the crowd waited anxiously to hear a sharp rebuttal of Modi from Jogi. The Gujarat CM had on Thursday ripped through “scam- ridden” Congress government amid cheers from the crowd.
Undoing the damage, Jogi took the fight back to the BJP camp by speaking in chaste Chhattisgarhi, interspersing it with extempore couplets that spoke of Sonia and Rahul’s “great deeds” for the poor.
He mocked at the BJP for picking points from the Congress manifesto and amid loud applause announced Congress’s populist food security scheme. Speaking in the end on a well-prepared pitch, Rahul delivered his usual trademark speech on development agenda of the Congress with ample dose of tribal rights. Free-wheeling talks with at least a dozen groups of people from all the three assembly constituencies of the Kanker district – Bhanupratappur, Antagarh and Kanker – showed that while Raman Singh enjoys a clean image, same is not true for his ministers and the state machinery.
The well oiled PDS system developed by Raman Singh that ensured his win in 2008 may not prove enough this time for BJP to woo the population that yearns for more freebies. “BJP government has lied to us all these years. They had promised to give us bonus of Rs250 per quintal of paddy per year but gave us only in the first year and now in the election year. There are no jobs for the youth,” said Bishnu Poya and Dharam Sodi, farmers from Lakhanpuri village of Bhanupratapur constituency.
Lokeshwar Nagesh of Bardewari village, Kanker was unhappy for not getting job in police. “I qualified five times but did not have money to get enrolled. I want change,” said Nagesh.
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