M F AHMAD
Daltonganj, Mar 11: AICC general secretary and Jharkhand in-charge of the Congress party Avinash Pande is due to arrive here in Daltonganj on Saturday (March 12), according to the district Congress president Bittu Pathak.
He is reaching Daltonganj to preside over the divisional meet of the Congressmen drawn from the organisation level right up to the panchayat level.
Pande is to arrive in Ranchi late this evening from Delhi by air. He will be reaching Daltonganj on Saturday by road and the same afternoon he will return to Ranchi by road.
He will be attending a similar divisional meet of his partymen at the Michael John Auditorium at Bistupur in Jamshedpur on Sunday (March 13). Pande will leave for Delhi on the same Sunday evening.
Bittu Pathak said, “We expect a turnout of around 700 partymen holding party posts up to the panchayat level. The venue is Pdt Deendayal Upadhayay Smiriti Bhavan also called a town hall in Daltonganj.
This is going to be the maiden visit of Pande in Daltonganj and it is at such a juncture when the Congress stands electorally devastated sliding almost near its decimation in the heartland UP.
As Palamu commissionerate has its boundaries with Uttar Pradesh, the political rumblings in that state have its shadow here too.
A Congress leader refusing to be identified said, “We do not know what our Jharkhand Congress in-charge Avinash Pande will tell us when we are down and out.”
He quipped that since December 2019, when the Hemant Soren-led government took the reign of the state, except for the minister Rameshwar Oraon no other minister be it Alamgir Alam or Banna Gupta or Hafizul Hassan Ansari or for that matter any important Congress leader has taken pains to come to Palamu to see how its Congress land Palamu was known for decades got annexed politically by the BJP.
The BJP has 4 MLAs here along with its MP. One other MLA is from the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP).
Ansari did come to Latehar which is one of the 3 districts of the Palamu commissionerate but his visit was for some inauguration of sports complex etc there in Latehar.
This Congress leader said if seniors ignore or overlook the grass root workers across the state then a repeat of UP is not far away in Jharkhand.
Sources said the BJP in Palamu is equally curious about this visit here of the Jharkhand in-charge of the Congress.
