For second time in a week, Rahul Gandhi to campaign in Vasundhara's bastion

Within a week of ringing the poll bugle in Udaipur, Rajasthan, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi is all set to storm into the state again. On Teusday, he will hold a mass rally in Baran district of the Hadauti region which is the bastion of BJP leader and former chief minister Vasundhara Raje.

Party sources here say the location of his second rally is crucial because it is part of a region considered the traditional stronghold of the BJP and its chief ministerial candidate Vasundhara’s family. Hadauti region comprises districts of Kota, Bundi, Jhalawar and Baran that has sent Vasundhara to the Lok Sabha five times before the 2004 elections, when her son Dushyant Singh retained the seat.  It was only in 2009 that Ijyaraj Singh of Congress won the Kota Lok Sabha seat, one of the two Parliamentary seats in Hadauti. In the previous poll, both the seats had gone to BJP.

Interestingly, out of the 17 Assembly seats in the region, the Congress had managed to win 10 in the 2008 elections. It won all four Assembly seats in Baran where Rahul is going to hold his second rally. The slated event indicates Congress’s hope to bank on the region for returning to power in the state. So far, Gandhi has not been fielded in the poll-bound states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Delhi.

On the day of the rally, Gandhi will inaugurate the Parwan Lift Irrigation Project, a mega drinking water and irrigation scheme. The Congress is going to sell the project as a major achievement ahead of the Assembly elections, putting Rahul’s name on it as it will positively impact the seven Assembly seats in the region.

However, that will leave BJP’s Rajya Sabha member V P Singh Badnaur fuming as it was he who had launched the scheme in 1998 in his capacity as the then state irrigation minister. The project got delayed as it was stuck in the Ministry of Environment and Forests for a clearance.