Sonia, Rahul to holiday in Goa

NEW DELHI: Activities at Congress headquarters have slowed down with Sonia Gandhi on Friday leaving for Goa enroute to Lakshadweep for an annual holiday. She will spend a couple of days in Goa with son Rahul Gandhi and daughter Priyanka and her family, and later all of them will leave for a beach resort in Lakshadweep for New Year’s eve celebrations.

According to sources, the Congress chief is expected to be back in Delhi on January 3 or 5. For the Gandhis, Lakshadweep has been an old family favourite for holidays since the days of late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

With the party president away on a holiday, most party leaders, barring a couple of AICC general secretaries, are also in a holiday mood as no important party meetings will be held for a week now. But for prime minister Manmohan Singh, New Year’s Eve will be just another Sunday with no plans for a special holiday.

But with the Election Commission today announcing the poll schedule for Congress-ruled Punjab, Uttarakhand and Manipur, Ms Gandhi and her AICC colleagues will plunge into the party’s election preparations as soon as she returns from the holiday. In any case, the anticipation is that the long-awaited AICC reshuffle could occur after January 14.

Some leaders say the leadership is keen to finalise its candidates’ list for the these three states by mid-January. Given the anti-incumbency burden the party is facing in these three states, there is a feeling among a section of leaders that the party should try to field many new faces.

Meanwhile, the EC decision to delink the polls in UP from the other three poll-bound states is exactly what the Congress has been rooting for. The party has been insisting that the UP polls should be held separately under the undivided attention of the EC as the party is extremely apprehensive of the tactics the Mulayam Singh Yadav government might employ.