Fuelling the “poster war” within the INDIA bloc, Congress workers on Thursday put up posters portraying Congress MP Rahul Gandhi as the Prime Ministerial candidate outside the party’s headquarters in Uttar Pradesh’s Lucknow. The poster also pictured state Congress Chief Ajay Rai as the Chief Ministerial candidate for the 2027 state assembly polls.
It included the goals and policies of the Congress party. Earlier, the Samajwadi Party (SP) workers put up posters of SP Chief Akhilesh Yadav showing him as “future Prime Minister”, to which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reacted and termed it as “daydreaming”.
The Congress and the Samajwadi Party are allies in the INDIA alliance, which was formed to take on the ruling BJP in the Lok Sabha polls in 2024. However, the alliance has yet to finalise its PM candidate.
The Congress and the SP have opened a fresh front after state unit chief Ajay Rai announced that he would go to meet jailed Samajwadi Party leader Azam Khan who is in Sitapur jail after he and his son were convicted in the fake marksheet case. The move hasn’t gone down well with the SP, Akhilesh Yadav questioned the Congress for not supporting Azam Khan when he was being targeted by the state administration.
“Where was the Congress when Azam Khan was being targeted, the leaders of the Congress were in-fact targeting Azam Khan” said Akhilesh Yadav on Wednesday. Earlier, tensions arose within the INDIA alliance with Uttar Pradesh Congress Unit Chief Ajay Rai asking the SP to withdraw from MP in favour of the grand old party as the Akhilesh Yadav-led party, he said, did not have any base there.
In response to it, the SP chief alleged that some “Congress leaders are siding with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)”, adding that he would not have trusted the grand old party if he had known that “Congress would betray them”. He further said he was unaware of the fact that the INDIA bloc has been formed at the national level to defeat the BJP and the alliance partners are not fighting together at the state level.
