Mumbai: The Congress Thursday launched its parliamentary poll campaign by holding a rally in Nagpur, the headquarters of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), with party president Mallikarjun Kharge underlining that the idea behind choosing the venue was to reaffirm that the Congress was defined by the “progressive” thoughts of B.R. Ambedkar, whose ideology finds echo in the city.
Congress MP Rahul Gandhi also framed the electoral battle of 2024 in sharp ideological terms, saying that contrary to the perception that the fight between the Congress and the BJP was political, it was essentially a fight to defeat the forces unleashed by the RSS, which is even “capturing educational institutes”.
In his speech at the ‘Hai Taiyyar Hum’ rally on a day that marked the 139th anniversary of the Congress’s foundation, Gandhi also reiterated that the party would undertake a nationwide caste census after returning to power at the Centre.
The Congress leaders also revived the party’s 2019 poll promise of implementing the Nyuntam Aay Yojana (Nyay), a minimum income guarantee scheme.
“There are two ideologies in Nagpur. One ideology is progressive, which belongs to Babasaheb Ambedkar. On the other side is the RSS, which is destroying the nation. And we have to walk on Ambedkar’s ideology,” Kharge said.
In his speech, Gandhi accused the RSS of taking India back to the “pre-Independence era”. “It is a battle of ideologies in the country currently. People think this is a political fight, a fight for power. But the foundation of this fight is ideology. Earlier, pre-Independence, women had no rights, Dalits were untouchable. This is RSS ideology and we have changed it. And today, they want to take us back to pre-Independence,” Gandhi said, adding that today, “vice-chancellors of institutions are not appointed on merit but based on ideology, and they all belong to one particular organisation”.
The Congress has internal democracy, where even a worker can give their ideas, “unlike the BJP where the leaders and workers only follow orders from top bosses”, he said.
“To all those asking what the Congress has done in many years, we’ve given the right to every citizen to vote and our forefathers have given a Constitution that gives rights to all citizens equally,” he said.
The speech comes at a time when all political parties in Maharashtra are preparing to fight next year’s general elections and later, the Maharashtra assembly polls.
Maharashtra has 48 parliamentary seats, second only to Uttar Pradesh’s 80. In the 2019 general elections, Congress won just one seat compared to 23 won by the BJP, 18 by the then undivided Shiv Sena, and four by the undivided Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).
Also Read: Pawar versus Pawar — how young gun Rohit is taking on uncle Ajit as battle for NCP legacy continues
Congress’ Nagpur connection
Nagpur has long held a special place for the Congress. It was during the party’s Nagpur Session in 1920 that Mahatma Gandhi announced the non-cooperation movement against the British.
It was also during a session here that former prime minister Indira Gandhi was made the All India Congress Committee (AICC) president in 1959.
Until the 1990s, the Congress was strong in Vidarbha, the region where Nagpur is located. Except for the years 1962, 1971, 1996, 2014, and 2019, the Nagpur parliamentary seat, too, had likewise been with the Congress.
According to Congress sources, there’s one more reason for selecting the city as the venue for the party’s foundation day rally — it was at Deekshabhoomi here that Ambedkar, along with lakhs of his followers, embraced Buddhism on Dusshera in 1956.
In 2014, Nitin Gadkari, a BJP heavyweight and the Union minister of road transport and highways, beat former Congress MP Vilas Muttemwar by over 2 lakh votes to win the Nagpur seat. He also beat Maharashtra Congress chief Nana Patole in the 2019 general elections.
Despite its losses, however, the Congress has been gaining lost ground in local elections over the past few years. In the 2022 panchayat samiti and the zilla parishad elections, for instance, the Congress got its chairperson elected in nine against the BJP’s tally of zero. The Congress also retained the post of president and vice-president in Nagpur Zilla Parishad.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
Also Read: Six friends & an amorphous group of Marathas — the backbone of Manoj Jarange-Patil’s quota stir