Mission UP: Congress looks for candidates at grassroots

NEW DELHI: The Congress is going down to the grassroots to identify candidates in the run-up to Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh in 2017.

As Congress begins its Mission UP, it has undertaken an exercise of identifying at least five leaders in each of 403 Assembly segments.

Taking a leaf out of Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi’s ambitious Leadership Development Mission to identify Dalit leaders, the state unit has already narrowed down to 2,163 prospective candidates across UP.

These candidates are being given different tasks to gauge their hold over the constituency. The next few months would be spent in carefully tabulating the achievement of targets by these candidates.

The first task set for the prospective candidates was to give a list of dedicated Congress workers in their constituency. Each candidate had to identify at least one worker per booth.

At the end of it, the party has a list of over 6 lakh booth workers. A senior Congress leader spearheading the exercise told ET, “We are maintaining data on every prospective candidate – how many people he has identified in his constituency, how many public meetings he has organized and how effective have been his interventions in raising public issues.

These would be tabulated and we would then have a proper dossier to present to the screening committee.” After identification of booth workers, the party is wrapping up the exercise of corroborating the lists supplied by each prospective candidate.

“We are calling each worker and thanking him/ her. We are saying ‘Thank you for supporting the party and we need your blessings and support for the elections. With this we are also reaching out to the worker and at the same time checking the accuracy of the list supplied by the candidates,” said another Congressman associated with the exhaustive exercise.

The lists have been found to be 50-90 per cent accurate. Now, the next task being given to the prospective candidates is to identify five dedicated Congress families in each booth.