Cong to train members on regionalism, caste politics

Midway through Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Congress bachao’ campaign in Uttar Pradesh, the first whispers about the young leader’s admiration for Mayawati kind of politics sneaked out. The Congress then expected Behenji to become the next CM, but with Congress support. Ms Mayawati turned all such plans on their head — she pushed the Congress and others to irrelevance by poaching upon the upper caste votes, reports Aarthi Ramachandran from New Delhi.

If the UP polls gave the grand old party of India one more reason to worry about regional satraps capturing centrestage, this anxiety was earlier reflected in the Congress president’s call for building up the organisation in states where UPA allies were strong. Now the party’s training department has settled for identifying the problem to begin with. The Congress is organising a training camp which, among other things, will examine the challenges before the party in states such as UP. Two hundred Congress workers from all over India will attend a training camp in the Capital that will go into how the party can take on caste-based outfits in the country.

“Challenges posed by caste-based parties in States such as UP needs to be understood. We are going to discuss this with our workers as part of their training,” a party functionary working on the project said.

The programme will be conducted through classroom sessions and discussions on subjects such as “regionalism” (longhand for caste) and “communalism” (ditto for BJP) where the participants will get to air their views, party sources said. This module of the training session, tentatively titled ‘Comparative study of democracy’, will be administered by experts shortlisted by the Congress. The trainees will be divided into English and Hindi batches, each consisting of 100 participants.

Some of the people identified, through not yet contacted by the party, are economist and Rajya Sabha MP Arjun Sengupta, political sociologist Imtiaz Ahmed, UGC chairman Sukhdev Thorat and poet-lyricist Javed Akhtar. Along with the experts, senior Congressmen such as Pranab Mukherjee, Devendra Dwivedi, Arjun Singh, Mani Shankar Aiyar, AR Antulay and others will also work with the trainees.

The Congress workers will also be given classes on the history of the party before and after Independence, the party constitution and social work undertaken by the party.

An area of focus will late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s contributions to the country. The party is projecting Rajiv Gandhi as the man who led India into the 21 century and decisively changed the course of the Congress. “We will discuss Rajiv Gandhi’s vision of taking India into the 21 century. After him, a new era in the Congress began,” the party functionary said.