Stop chasing leaders, connect with people: Rahul to Maharashtra district heads

Rahul Gandhi subsequently spent around three hours with the Congress’s district and city presidents.

Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday urged Congress leaders in Maharashtra to stop chasing senior party functionaries and instead reach out to people, build direct connections with them and understand their concerns, as he sought to strengthen the party’s grassroots organisation in the state.

LoP Rahul Gandhi was in Nashik to attend a training camp for 69 newly appointed Congress district and city presidents. (AICC) (AICC)

The Congress MP also attacked the central government’s economic policies, saying that India had neglected farming despite its potential to make the country a superpower. He further argued that an excessive focus on trade rather than production was limiting job creation.

Gandhi was in Nashik to attend the concluding session of a 10-day residential training camp for 69 newly appointed Congress district and city presidents in Maharashtra. He also held a separate meeting with tribal students to discuss issues facing the community.

Before attending the training camp, Gandhi held a 40-minute meeting with senior party leaders to take stock of the organisation and discuss key issues facing Maharashtra, including the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, the budgetary allocation for the Nashik Kumbh, and farmer suicides.

Referring to the deletion of 20.7 million names from the draft electoral rolls for Maharashtra, Gandhi reiterated his allegation that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had won the 2024 assembly elections through “vote theft”. He urged Congress leaders to closely monitor voter deletions and take a more aggressive stand on the ongoing SIR process, a party insider revealed.

“Rahul ji told us to closely monitor this issue and become aggressive, and stressed the need to strengthen the party’s organisation at the grassroots,” the senior leader told Hindustan Times.

Gandhi subsequently spent around three hours with the Congress’s district and city presidents. He held two one-hour sessions, one on global politics and another on jiu-jitsu.

During a session on “Global Politics and India”, Gandhi asked the participants which country they considered a global superpower and what India needed to do to become one, according to a district president who attended the interaction.

He said the US had built its global power on two key strengths—the dollar and defence. The US dollar, he said, dominates international trade, while its military strength gives it the capability to take on any country. “Are we in that position? India would need to build similar economic and strategic strength to emerge as a superpower,” Gandhi is said to have said during the interaction.

According to Gandhi, the US had focused on production and job creation, while India had increasingly moved towards trade. “Production creates jobs,” he said and alleged that the current government’s policies were designed to benefit a handful of business houses. “The result is limited job creation and rising unemployment,” Gandhi reportedly said.

He described farming as India’s biggest production industry and claimed that little was being done for farmers. “We are doing nothing for farmers,” he said, pointing to inadequate access to fertilisers and quality pesticides, as well as the lack of remunerative prices for agricultural produce and proper compensation when natural calamities destroy their crops.

Turning to the Congress organisation, Gandhi urged workers to focus on people rather than senior party leaders. “Keeping political ambition is a good thing, but it will become a reality only when you reach out to the people and build strong connections with them,” he said, adding that this would also make the party stronger.

“A Congress worker should not chase leaders but work for the people,” he said.