Priyanka Gandhi will kick off the first round of her Lok Sabha election campaign from the Ganga, aboard a motorboat.
The Congress general secretary’s 100km “Ganga Yatra” from Allahabad on Monday to Varanasi on Wednesday will be punctuated by over two dozen halts, during which she will get ashore to visit villagers living on the banks.
Few details are available yet of the three-day campaign, which will begin at the birthplace of Priyanka’s great-grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru and grandmother Indira Gandhi and end at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency.
However, state Congress vice-president R.P. Tripathi wrote to the chief election commissioner on Thursday seeking permission for the programme.
“There are programmes during this journey where people of the areas would welcome her,” the letter says.
Congress sources said that members of Priyanka’s core group had arrived in Allahabad and Varanasi to oversee the arrangements.
State Congress general secretary and spokesperson Dwijendra Tripathi explained why it was important for Priyanka to start her campaign with a journey down the Ganga.
“The BJP has converted Hindutva into a political slogan. It has not spared any religious symbol, not even the Holy Ganga, in its efforts to grab power. Priyanka’s waterway journey becomes very important in this situation,” he said.
Modi has since 2014 been claiming that “Mother Ganga” had summoned him to contest the general election from Varanasi. He recently added that Shiva had assigned him the job of renovating the Kashi Vishwanath temple in the constituency.
“She (Priyanka) will meet lakhs of people who live on the Ganga’s banks and learn their perspective of the holy river, which is not only a religious symbol for them but also a source of livelihood,” Dwijendra said.
“They may be farmers or boatmen or from any other community. It would be an occasion for our leader to see whether the Ganga has been cleaned, as the Modi and Yogi Adityanath governments have been claiming.”
Speculation had swirled during the January 14-March 4 Ardh Kumbh Mela in Allahabad that Priyanka would take a holy bath there. But she chose not to vie with Modi and Adityanath, both of whom visited the Mela to take the holy dip.
Dwijendra threw a challenge to the BJP. “Modi and his finance minister, Arun Jaitley, have been blaming Nehru for certain things. We are eagerly waiting to hear their remarks on Priyanka’s journey down a waterway developed by the Modi government — one that would remain dry six months a year,” he said.
Jaitley had on Thursday said that Nehru was “the original sinner” who had paved the way for China to block the UN’s effort to designate Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar as a global terrorist this week.
Replying to Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s remark that a “weak Modi” was “scared of” the Chinese President, Jaitley had said China wouldn’t have been in the UN Security Council had Nehru not gifted the seat to Beijing at India’s expense.