Rahul Gandhi tries personal touch to connect with voters

On Thursday, Sonia Gandhi asked Congressmen to focus on re-establishing their 'connect with the masses'

From taking part in the iconic ‘sandhya aarti’ (evening aarti) at the Dashashwamedh Ghat in Benares to going on a four-km-long ‘padayatra’ (journey on foot) with Youth Congress workers in Mirzapur, Congress ‘veep’ Rahul Gandhi - who is currently touring Uttar Pradesh - is setting the tone for the party’s election campaign strategy.

Through his padayatras, door-to-door campaigns and other methods to reach out to the masses, the Gandhi scion has been stressing on need to establish mass contact. At the first election campaign committee meeting in the capital on Thursday, chaired by Congress President Sonia Gandhi, Congressmen were advised focus on re-establishing their ‘connect with the masses.’

Discussing the electoral campaign strategy in the run-up to the 2014 polls, several Congressmen present at the meeting conceded that merely holding massive rallies was not proving to be effective.  Congress workers have been directed to hold week-long ‘padyatras’ in all Lok Sabha constituencies, and to utilise the opportunity to create awareness about the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government’s policies by distributing one-page flyers listing the government’s achievements.

In addition to public rallies, party workers have also been advised to focus on holding focus group meetings at village chaupals.

According to party sources, during his ongoing UP tour, Rahul Gandhi will also undertake some impromptu visits to the homes of local residents along the padayatra route. As Benares is synonymous with the Kashi Vishwanath temple, Gandhi is also slated to drop by at the temple, which is bound to resonate with the local population there.

On his earlier tours in Kerala and Gujarat, Gandhi had taken the padayatra route.

The Congress leadership has been maintaining that the UPA government does not lack achievements but it has lost out because there is a lack of awareness among the masses about its decade-long work.

While critics say this realisation within the Congress stems out of the success of the Aam Aadmi Party’s door-to-door campaign strategy in Delhi, the Congress hopes this exercise will also help it in getting valuable feedback from the public and an opportunity to dispel the vilification campaign launched by the Opposition.