NEW DELHI, 29 April 2006 — Congress President Sonia Gandhi yesterday appointed daughter Priyanka Vadra as her election agent for the May 8 Lok Sabha by-election, campaigning for which has been unable to draw Congress bigwigs.
The appointment of Priyanka, who was Sonia’s election agent also in the 2004 general elections, conforms to the practice of the Gandhi family to keep the campaigning generally restricted to local congress leaders and the family.
Rahul Gandhi, MP from the neighboring Amethi Lok Sabha constituency, is the campaign manager of the current election. He has been touring the length and breadth of Rae Bareli, considered the pocket borough of the Gandhi-Nehru family which Sonia has described as her “karma bhoomi”.
Sonia has made the by-election a prestige fight by declaring that it would prove where the opposition stood. She won the 2004 election by a margin of over 240,000 votes and the party claims that it would wider this time.
Meanwhile, Congress leaders yesterday denied media reports that Rahul met a delegation of bar girls in Rae Bareli recently while campaigning for his mother. Congress said the young MP had neither visited the area where the bar girls lived nor did any delegation meet him Thursday.
“While the report said 1,000 bar girls had met him demanding opening of bars in Rae Bareli and Amethi, there are only a few of them living in the area... There was no interaction with them whatsoever and the reports in this regard are fabricated,” Congress spokesman A.P Singh said, adding “the party is shocked by the report.”
The report had claimed that the bar girls demanded either new job opportunities or opening up of bars in Amethi and Rae Bareli as their source of income had dried up. Dance bars were shut down by a government order in Bombay last year.
Rahul visited Samarpaha village in the Dalmau assembly segment on Thursday evening for electioneering. Some women, who once worked as bar girls in Bombay, live on the eastern flank of the village. “But certainly, there was no assurance from the Congress MP with regard to opening of dance bars in his mother’s constituency,” the Congress spokesman asserted.
