Cool Breeze: PK starts Punjab campaign

 

While the UP Congressmen are still quibbling over Prashant Kishor’s role in the campaign strategy, Captain Amarinder Singh is not wasting any time taking his counsel. And it seems that after advising Narendra Modi to do Chai Pe Charcha during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, and Nitish Kumar to do Parche Pe Charcha in the 2015 Bihar Assembly polls, Kishor has coined the Coffee with Captain for the Congress party’s CM candidate, Amarinder Singh. The hoardings are all over Punjab, specially reaching out to the young voter for an interaction with the Captain. Clearly, it’s a smart move to downplay the Maharaja lineage with today’s youth and instead play the more patriotic Army card. 

On a footnote, one reason why the Punjab campaign has taken off much before the UP one is that in Punjab at least PK has a popular candidate to market. In UP, well, that’s another story. 

 

Congress sympathiser and model Tehseem Poonawala’s wedding to Rober Vadra’s cousin Monika was a power packed evening for the Congress party, with most of its leaders in full attendance. Apart from Priyanka, her mother Sonia was also present with grandson Rehan by her side. Other leaders who were present included Digvijaya Singh, Kamal Nath, Janardhan Dwivedi, Sanjay Nirupam, Shashi Tharoor, Rajiv Shukla, Salman Khurshid and Manish Tewari. The topic that evening was about the Uttarakhand crisis and most Congress leaders feared that the Congress government in Himachal was next on the BJP hit list. A senior leader even feared that Virbhadra Singh may be arrested soon. And interestingly, while a few BJP spokesmen, whom the Poonawala brothers, both Tehseem and Shehzad, have sparred with on television debates, made a brief appearance, they did not linger long, Clearly, this was a Congress show of strength. 

 

If the Congress loses Uttarakhand, then they have more to mourn than the loss of a state. At stake is also a Rajya Sabha seat from the state, which is currently held by the BJP’s Tarun Vijay, but was going to fall in the Congress kitty prior to the rebellion of nine Congress MLAs. According to sources, Congress notables like Jairam Ramesh and Kapil Sibbal had already begun lobbying for this. But now with the numbers suddenly switching towards the BJP, it seems as if this seat will be out of Congress grasp. And for some, clearly the loss of a seat will hurt more than the loss of a state.