Mumbai: A resurgent Congress in Madhya Pradesh will launch its assembly election campaign 6 June when party president Rahul Gandhi attends a public meeting in Mandsaur to pay tribute to five farmers killed in police firing last year. Congress functionaries in Madhya Pradesh said around 200,000 farmers are likely to attend the meeting. They said farm issues would set the agenda for the assembly election, and that the Congress was keen to get a head start on the farm front.
Madhya Pradesh goes to polls along with two other Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states of Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh in October-November.
“This would be a reminder to the BJP government in Madhya Pradesh of how it killed innocent farmers on June 6 last year. We expect around 2 lakh farmers to attend the meeting,” Jitu Patwari, the working president of Madhya Pradesh Congress Committee, told Mint on the phone. He said the Congress president would also present his vision for “prosperous farming” at the meeting.
“Though the context will be Madhya Pradesh elections and farmers’ plight in Madhya Pradesh, Rahul ji would propose a national idea of ‘fixed minimum income per acre’ for farmers. This fixed minimum income can be provided either by the market or by the government. This idea can be implemented by launching it initially across all 350 revenue divisions in the country. The government should prepare division-level plans for agriculture based on the climate conditions and crop patterns in a particular division. This can later be replicated at the tehsil level. The Congress party is confident that this idea, if implemented well, would solve 90% of the problems confronting the farmers,” Patwari said. He added that the Congress, if elected to power in Madhya Pradesh, would implement this plan in the state.
Last year, a farmers’ protest in Mandsaur turned violent and five farmers died in the police firing that ensued. The Congress party, eyeing a return to power in the state after 15 years, latched on to farmers’ resentment to highlight the ground reality against the government's claims of a consistent 20% per annum growth of agriculture productivity.
Another state Congress functionary, who did not want to be named, told Mint that Congress wanted to set the agenda for the 2018 elections by not allowing the BJP get a head start “like in 2014”.
With party veteran and MP from Chhindwara Kamal Nath being made the state unit chief in April along with an organizational revamp, the Congress is trying to forge unity among all its factions and build a campaign to exploit the sentiment of anti-incumbency against the Shivraj Singh Chouhan government. On 3 June, Nath led a Congress delegation to the Election Commission of India (EC) to complain about 6 million “bogus voters” in Madhya Pradesh. The EC has ordered a probe into voters’ lists in four assembly constituencies.
Encouraged by the success of its alliance with the Janata Dal (Secular) in Karnataka, the Congress in Madhya Pradesh is in talks with the Bahujan Samaj Party, Samajwadi Party, and the local Gondwana Party for a pre-poll coalition, Kamal Nath told reporters last week.