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Journalism of Courage
More than a month after the Bharat Jodo Yatra started, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra will join party MP and her brother Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra in Moradabad on Saturday and will be a part of the rest of the Uttar Pradesh leg of the march.
Priyanka was scheduled to join the yatra last week when it entered UP through Chandauli district but had to drop out because of ill health. According to Congress insiders, the Congress leader who was in charge of the party’s UP affairs till a couple of years ago will accompany Rahul as the yatra traverses through Moradabad and then travels through Amroha, Sambhal, Bulandshahr, Aligarh, Hathras, and Agra, before concluding at Fatehpur Sikri on Sunday. Samajwadi Party (SP) president Akhilesh Yadav, with whom the party has struck a seat-sharing deal will join the yatra in Agra on February 25.
The yatra will then go on a five-day break from February 26 to March 1 to allow Rahul to travel to the UK to deliver two lectures at his alma mater Cambridge University and attend important meetings in New Delhi.
In context: While a pact for Uttar Pradesh has been seemingly wrapped up, it is not yet clear how long it will take to finalise seat-sharing deals in other states such as Maharashtra and Bihar. But since the UP agreement and the one with the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for Delhi were announced, things have been looking up for the INDIA alliance of Opposition parties. The Congress is trying to reach an agreement with the AAP in states such as Goa and Gujarat too, and has claimed that dialogue with the Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the National Conference (NC), which had seemed off the table a few days ago, were on. Sources have told Lalmani Verma that the TMC is bargaining with the Congress for seats in Assam and Meghalaya in return for constituencies in West Bengal. However, TMC Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien has said there is no change in the party’s position that it is going to contest all 42 seats in Bengal. “We are also in the fray in a few seats in Assam and the Tura Lok Sabha seat in Meghalaya,” he said on Friday.
How developments on this front unfold on Saturday will be among the things to watch out for.
Meanwhile, a day after visiting his constituency Varanasi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will continue with inaugurating and laying the foundation stone of development projects. He is set to address the “Viksit Bharat Viksit Chhattisgarh” programme from 12.30 pm onwards via video conferencing. During the programme, the PM will inaugurate and launch multiple development projects worth over Rs 34,400 crore in sectors such as roads, railways, coal, power, and solar energy, as per a press release from his office.
This week, the PM has unveiled and launched projects from Sambhal and Varanasi in UP, Gujarat, and Jammu. He is again scheduled to be back in Gujarat on Sunday.
