Chhattisgarh assembly elections 2018: Congress takes a leaf out of Amit Shah's book

By FnF Correspondent | PUBLISHED: 12, Nov 2018, 16:59 pm IST | UPDATED: 12, Nov 2018, 17:03 pm IST

Desk FnF: Chhattisgarh Congress chief Bhupesh Baghel was not really excited when a friend suggested training sessions for workers of India’s oldest political party. He found a proposal for a 5-hour long session particularly unamusing. “I have been a Congressman for 35 years and have never done any training session even for 2 hours. Making workers sit for that long is impossible,” Baghel told an advisor.

Baghel eventually agreed to the idea reluctantly. A banquet hall was booked in Raipur in June last year for the purpose and invitations were sent to 200 booth level workers for the training. The training session in Raipur covered four subjects – the party’s achievements and ideology, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s “truth”, booth level management, and social media.

“The session went on for 7 hours,” said Vinod Verma, Congress’s poll consultant adding that such sessions have since been organised in 87 out of the 90 assembly segments in the state. The exercise impressed Congress president Rahul Gandhi, who flew to Bastar to attend one such session in August last year.

Baghel was by then excited with the outcome and decided to take a leaf out of BJP president Amit Shah’s book and to formulate a booth level plan. This has been BJP’s tested exercise and a new concept for Chhattisgarh Congress, which now claims to have its units in place at 22,000 out of 23,411 polling stations.

A section unit each was created to cover 100-125 households. A team comprising a woman, a youth and a senior worker was assigned to each section. This is like Shah’s Panna Pramukh concept, wherein he appoints an in-charge for every page of a voter list covering 25-30 voters.

The Congress also set up an executive committee of 21 workers for every booth. The BJP has a team of 10 workers for every booth committee.

“These activities helped us make a Congress worker vocal — both on the ground and on the social media. Decency is maintained in the discourse,” Verma said. Congress leaders say the exercise has helped the party overcome the fear factor. They say PM Narendra Modi’s popularity along with Shah’s organisational skills had the Congress in Chhattisgarh, like elsewhere, awestruck. It has helped the Congress launch a more aggressive campaign. Congress’s Vikas Khojo Yatra followed CM Raman Singh’s Vikas Yatra to every constituency, questioning his claims about development.

Journalist Lalit Surjan said the Congress is trying to infuse new blood into its organisational set-up but insisted it has a limited role to play. “The Congress is not a cadre-based party like the BJP.”

BJP leader Pankaj Jha was dismissive. “Their campaign could never take off. They struggled with infighting,” he said.