There may be a chorus within his party for him to take over the mantle of the prime minister, but Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi has embarked on a fitness test through the rural landscape of Uttar Pradesh in this sweltering heat.
In his by-now-perfected trademark style, he walked in to Parsaul village early Tuesday morning and caught the district administration unaware. No one in the state government had any inkling that he was on a five-day padyatra that would end with a kisan mahapanchayat at Aligarh on July 9. Even the retinue of Congress leaders was absent from the scene.
Rahul wants to find out first-hand from the farmers, the intricacies of land acquisition in these villages along the Yamuna Expressway as he admits that ‘sitting in Delhi’ you cannot get a hang of the things.
Well for the rest of the polity, this is just the stated objective, and the real mission is to drum up support for his party that was virtually nowhere on the scene when the assembly polls were held in 2007.
For 2012 assembly elections, Rahul has challenged UP chief minister Mayawati. “This is his own mission, and this is his padyatra. So the Congressmen have been asked to stay away, and they shall all gather at Aligarh for the mahapanchayat,” said Digvijay Singh, Congress general secretary in charge of UP.
For the young Congress leader whose abilities as a winner at the polls have not yet been established, this padyatra is also a test of his physical fitness. He will be covering more than 200 kilometres till Agra, and though his plans remain undisclosed he is expected to camp in villages that have emerged as sensitive points in the entire land acquisition tussle between the Mayawati government and the farmers.
An avid trainer who sweats out at a five star gym, Rahul is expected to rough out these five days in the western UP heartland in his quest to be a popular politician.
