Priyanka Gandhi's efforts to pit Congress as UP CM Yogi Adityanath's main challenger

With her sharp criticism, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has kept up the heat on Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and sought to pit the Congress as the main opposition to the BJP in the state.

As regional outfits Bahujan Samaj Party and Samajwadi Party relegated to the margins after the Lok Sabha loss last year, Priyanka, the AICC General Secretary in-charge of Uttar Pradesh, has put the Congress in the forefront – be it in ensuring the safe return of migrant workers home or the raising issues touching the poor and the deprived.

The standoff with the UP government over deploying buses to ferry migrant workers home and the subsequent arrest of UP Congress president Ajay Singh Lallu helped the party galvanise support in the state where it ruled three decades back.

Priyanka took the lead in expressing solidarity with Lallu, praising his grit and perseverance and hitting out at the Yogi government for violating all humanitarian principles by keeping him behind bars for more than three weeks.

It was on her instructions that Congress workers staged demonstrations across the state demanding the release of Lallu, who was arrested on the charges of forging documents of buses the party had proposed to deploy to ferry migrant workers.

Priyanka had kept up the attack on the Yogi government on issues such as farmers’ suicides and the alleged irregularities in the appointment of 69,000 teachers in the state

The Congress leader’s activism has alerted the BJP leaders, who sought to dismiss her as a social media activist.

“We have already named her ‘Priyanka Twitter Vadra...she tweets for two-three days and social media shows her as a prominent national leader,” Keshav Prasad Maurya, Uttar Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister said recently.

Maurya pointed out that Priyanka had campaigned hard for her elder brother Rahul Gandhi, but had failed to ensure his victory from Amethi.

Rahul Gandhi had tried to revive the Congress in UP since his political debut in 2004 but failed to make a mark barring the odd success in the Lok Sabha elections of 2009 when the party had won 21 of the 80 seats in UP.

Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, Priyanka and Jyotiraditya Scindia were given the task of reviving the party’s fortunes in UP, but the BJP swept the polls yet again with the then Congress president Rahul losing his family bastion of Amethi to the BJP.