Election in sight, Congress to bolster ground strength

NEW DELHI: The Congress leadership has started reviving the party at the grassroots as the Lok Sabha elections are just six months away.

The state leadership has started strengthening its cadre at the polling booth level by assigning additional responsibilities to workers and exhorting them to bring the ideology of the Congress and the work done by its previous governments back into discussion among people.

Senior state unit functionaries said the party has started appointing representatives in each of the 13,820 polling booths. They would ensure that all eligible voters in their assigned areas are enrolled with the election commission and they will also take the message of the party to each and every household in their area.

Failing to win even a single election since the municipal polls of 2012, the Congress has been trying to regroup and present itself as a viable alternative in the city's electoral politics, which has largely become a direct fight between AAP and BJP.

The Congress recently appointed former Delhi minister Arvinder Singh Lovely, probably the only leaderin the capital with an across-the-city presence, to resurrect the flagging unit.

"No election can be fought without a strong team at the grassroots. We have started an exercise to appoint our representatives, whom we call BLA-2 (booth level agents), at the polling levels. We are actually preparing our election machinery," Lovely said, adding that the party would hold a convention of these 14,000-odd workers ahead of the polls.

He added that earlier every Lok Sabha or the assembly candidate used to have his or her own team of workers who would manage tasks at the booth level. "This is the first time we are preparing a strong cadre, a mix of both seniors and youth, who will handle the groundwork for the party, irrespective of who the candidate is," Lovely said.

Chattar Singh, a senior Delhi Congress functionary known for his expertise in delimitation and voting patterns, said the Congress in its convention in Raipur in February discussed the organisational structure and emphasised on setting up committees at the micro-level to strengthen the party.

"We recently carried out a delimitation exercise within the party and divided the city at the mandal (zonal) and sectors levels," he said.