assembly-elections

Updated: Oct 17, 2019 12:19 IST

Congress president Sonia Gandhi will address an election rally in Haryana on Friday, her first after she took over the reins of the grand old party in August following her son Rahul Gandhi’s resignation owning responsibility for the drubbing in this year’s Lok Sabha polls.

Sonia Gandhi, who turns 73 this December, will campaign in Mahendragarh from where Congress candidate Rao Daan Singh is contesting against Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) minister Ram Bilas Sharma. She is yet to campaign in Maharashtra, the other state going to polls with Haryana on October 21. Votes will be counted on October 24.

The Congress president has in the recent years curtailed her public functions and had last addressed a rally in Rae Bareli on June 12 to thank the voters of her Lok Sabha constituency for re-electing her. Prior to that, she spoke at a public meeting in Rae Bareli on May 2 while campaigning for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

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Sonia Gandhi, who is also the chairperson of the much truncated opposition grouping United Progressive Alliance (UPA), had last time campaigned for a state election in Telangana on November 23 last year. She had skipped the assembly elections in other states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram. The first three were won by the Congress.

Sonia Gandhi was forced to call off a road show in Varanasi mid way due to ill health and a shoulder injury on August 2, 2016 ahead of Uttar Pradesh assembly elections. The road show was to launch the party’s poll campaign .

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She had also stayed away from canvassing in Punjab, Goa, Uttarakhand, Manipur (February-March 2017) and subsequently Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh in (December 2017) and also Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland (February 2018).

After nearly 20 months of break, Sonia Gandhi once again hit the campaign trail by addressing a rally at Bijapur in Karnataka on May 8 last year. For his part, Rahul Gandhi has stepped up campaign in both Maharashtra and Haryana, addressing public meetings in different parts of the two states.