Rahul Gandhi to begin campaign at Wayanad on April 3

Thiruvananthapuram: Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is scheduled to commence his election campaign at Wayanad in Kerala on April 3.

A major road show and filing on the nomination will mark Rahul's day long campaign. He will return on the same day and will visit again, said party sources.

The Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) is planning to make Rahul's roadshow a major event as witnessed in 2019.

While Congress camps are expressing hopes that Rahul's candidature from Kerala would have a cascading effect across the state and benefit UDF candidates at all the other 19 seats in Kerala. In 2019 UDF won 19 out of the 20 seats in Kerala.

BJP is of the view that in 2019 there was a strong feeling that Congress will return to power and Rahul will become the Prime Minister. However, this time there is no such feeling in Rahul's favour. BJP also hopes to bring down Rahul's whooping victory margin of 4.3 lakh votes in 2019 as the saffron party is giving a strong fight by fielding party state president K Surendran.

Left-front fielded CPI national leader Annie Raja and hence there is high chances of a split in the anti-BJP votes.

Meanwhile, the Congress is hopeful of connecting to the people more effectively through a crowdfunding initiative for raising money for campaigning of Congress candidates in view of the party's fund crunches caused by freezing of bank accounts by the Income Tax department.

Congress sources said that through the crowd funding the party could effectively convey to the people the misuse of power by the BJP government at the centre against the opposition parties. Crowd funding initiative would be carried out at all the constituencies.