After Sonia call, Congress takes hard look at UP

The underlying message from the Congress strategists for UP is clear—that Rahul won’t start making his presence felt there till the organisational structure in in place. ‘‘Those who are waiting to become MLAs and MPs on account of Rahul’s charisma are being asked to put in some work first,’’ said an AICC functionary.

Rahul aired similar views at the Plenary. ‘‘We blame others for our problems, but we need to work hard, taking up issues of the poor, to revive the party in places where we are weak,’’ he had said. In the first week of February, all AICC functionaries from UP—there are 20—and five former presidents of the state unit will be called for a meeting to seek a consensus on the new approach.

The 70 districts in UP will be divided into six or seven zones, with a set of senior leaders in charge of each. With the party is in a shambles in UP, most senior leaders in the state currently work at cross-purposes. Now, each will have a stake in building up the organisation, says an AICC functionary.

J D Seelam said the aim was to have functional committees for the Congress down to the village level before the state goes to the polls at the end of the year. In most places in UP, Congress committees exist only on paper and the few who really work for the party find it difficult to get representation. Seelam said a new mechanism is being devised in which a worker who enrolls new members and stays active will be immediately rewarded. ‘‘We can recognise their work by inducting them into a higher body out of turn,’’ Seelam points out.

Gehlot and Seelam, an IAS-officer-turned-Congressman and Rajya Sabha member from Andhra Pradesh, are the high-command’s pointsmen for its UP bid. The party high-command is counting on Gehlot’s political acumen and Seelam’s bureaucratic hard work deliver the goods there. The challenge for the duo is to make UP permeable to Rahul’s charisma.

‘‘Before we bring in the tractor, we need to remove the rocks. Otherwise the rocks will damage the tractor too,’’ points out another UP-watcher in the Congress.