Dragging in Raje

It was largely a whisper in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress corridors until now. On Thursday, the Rashtriya Loktantrik Party’s Hanuman Beniwal alleged that former chief minister Vasundhara Raje was trying to help the Ashok Gehlot-led “minority government” in Rajasthan survive. There has been much speculation that Raje, whom the Congress unseated in the 2018 Assembly polls in the state, is not keen that rebel Congress leader Sachin Pilot topples the Gehlot government, with the generous help of the BJP. Beniwal, a Lok Sabha MP, alleged that Raje had also phoned several Congress legislators. Beniwal tagged Union Home Minister Amit Shah and BJP President J P Nadda in his post.

Promotional politics

With growing criticism that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi does not promote younger leaders in the party, the Congress social media team on Wednesday evening launched a Twitter campaign to support him. The effort is to show that Gandhi may be a dynast himself, but he has groomed young talent from non-political backgrounds.

The Congress social media team had several young leaders, including first time MPs like Ramya Haridas, and others took to Twitter to extol how Gandhi handpicked them, even to contest for Lok Sabha polls, or put them in leadership roles. All went well until Thursday afternoon, when the party’s social media team ended up facing an onslaught from an unlikely quarter — the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). Its spokesperson Raghav Chadha said the Congress had no future. The AAP social media team ran a campaign claiming that electing a Congress legislator was akin to electing one from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) because the Congress one would eventually join the BJP. The Congress social media team then called the AAP the “B team” of the BJP. The BJP was largely silent.

Holy project

Guess who is worried about the Kanwar Yatra, the annual pilgrimage of devotees of Shiva to fetch holy Ganga water, not taking place this year because of Covid-19? The Uttarakhand unit of the Indian Youth Congress has taken it upon itself to distribute Ganga water in plastic cans to devotees. On Thursday, Indian Youth Congress National President Srinivas B V launched a campaign to distribute Ganga water to devotees across the country from its national office in Delhi.