Priyanka to hop on to RaGa’s bus yatra

Hyderabad: The Congress party in its bid to reach out to people and demonstrate its unity and seriousness to give a tough fight to the ruling BRS will launch a ‘bus yatra’ on Wednesday.

AICC former president Rahul Gandhi and party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi will kick start the yatra from the Rudreswara temple, popularly known as Ramappa, in Mulugu district on Wednesday. They will reach Mulugu from Hyderabad by a chopper and will offer prayers at the 13th century temple which is now declared as a world heritage site by UNESCO.

The three-day ‘bus yatra’ will travel across all the constituencies of Mulugu, Peddapalli, Karimnagar and Nizamabad districts for which the party had announced the names of the candidates.

It will be led by TPCC chief Revanth Reddy. All senior state Congress leaders will also be part of the yatra.

During the yatra, Rahul, Priyanka and senior leaders would interact with women, youth and other communities and will try to understand their problems, and will explain the ‘6 Guarantees’. It will be a combination of mass contact programme, public meetings, padayatras by Rahul and Priyanka. The first public meeting would be held at Bhupalpalli where local youth will join the padayatra. On October 19, Rahul will interact with employees of the Singareni Collieries Company Ltd, NTPC and Ramagundam Fertilisers and Chemicals Ltd.

This would be followed by another meeting at Peddapalli. When the yatra enters the Nizamabad parliamentary constituency, Rahul will meet beedi workers, Gulf migrants’ families and Nizam Sugar Factory workers at Shakkarnagar near Bodhan. The factory was sold to private entities. He will then meet farmers of Armoor where turmeric is grown. Recently the Prime Minister announced the setting up of a Turmeric Board. Rahul will take up padayatra in Nizamabad and will speak at a public meeting before winding up the yatra.

The Congress had taken a similar bus yatra ahead of the recent Karnataka assembly elections. Incidentally, the idea of bus yatras as a way of keeping pre-poll internal unity and poll mobilisation within the Congress was originally conceived by now estranged Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad when he was the AICC general secretary of Karnataka and (united) Andhra Pradesh in the past.