Sonia dons new image, tries to be leader of the masses

Party circles have also noted that on her visit to the Sewa Dal’s training camp for national instructors at Padampura near Jaipur last week, Sonia declined to stay overnight at Raj Bhavan in the state capital, choosing the more mundane surroundings of the camp venue. There she tried to strike a direct rapport with party workers from all over the country.

As part of this strategy to convey that Sonia is a leader of the masses, her advisors have now planned an extensive rail-cum-road `Jan Sampark’ (Mass Contact) yatra in Uttar Pradesh early next month.

The yatra is scheduled to commence on November 8 in Delhi, from where Sonia will take a train to Fatehpur, and will culminate two days later in Lucknow, taking Sonia to the more backward areas of Bundelkhand and central Uttar Pradesh. From Fatehpur, the Congress chief will travel by road to Allahabad via Banda and address several impromptu gatherings on the way. From Allahabad, her journey will continue, again by road, to Lucknow after passing through Pratapgarh and Rae Bareli.

This, party sources affirm, will be Sonia’s longest-ever road journey. As party chief, she has generally shied away from train and road journeys and confined her interaction with the people to fleeting visits to massive rallies by aircraft or helicopter.

As a result, the Congress chief has often in the past been accused of shying away from interacting with people in their surroundings and preferring to run the party from the closed environs of 10 Janpath with her coterie of select leaders for company. With the demoralised Congress cadre not showing much enthusiasm for the ongoing organisational elections, especially in states where the party is not in power, Sonia is under all the more pressure now to lead the party from the front to rejuvenate the rank and file.

“These trips, apart from enabling her to communicate more informally with the cadres, are also aimed at dispelling the general impression in party circles that the Congress chief is too much dependent on a coterie and cannot function otherwise,” says a senior party leader close to 10 Janpath.

The fact that Sonia has chosen Uttar Pradesh as the testing ground for her “mass contact” programme is also not without political overtones. The state has the largest number of AICC and PCC delegates and she obviously doesn’t want any upsets given the fact that the Congress’s chief dissident at present, Jitendra Prasada, also hails from the state.