Cong to launch Dalit outreach, go door to door
Saturday, 25/06/2016
http://www.tribuneindia.com/news/punjab/community/cong-to-launch-dalit-outreach-go-door-to-door/256665.html
New Delhi : The Congress is planning a major outreach to woo Dalits, demographically the biggest vote bank in Punjab.
The door-to-door drive covering all 18 lakh Scheduled Caste (SC) households will be launched in mid-July. It will be aimed at disseminating Punjab Congress president Capt Amarinder Singh’s pro-Dalit messages. “It will be a kind of ‘Ghar Ghar Capt’ campaign,” said a senior party leader involved in the outreach.
The decision to start the drive was taken here today following a review of the state party SC cell, which started working on the Dalit voter base two years ago after the Congress appointed party vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s confidant K Raju to head the All India Congress SC department.
Since then, the party has been building its SC organisation right up to the block and booth levels. A top source said the party now had SC committees in all 234 blocks of Punjab, where Dalits account for 31.9 per cent of the population.
“We are identifying 10 volunteers per village to make them members of the state Congress village-level SC committees. Since there are 12,800 villages, we will have 1.28 lakh village workers whom we will use for the door-to-door campaign,” said Raj Kumar Chhabewal, chairman of the Punjab SC cell, who was in Delhi today for discussions.
