Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge will visit Chhattisgarh on Sunday to go to a state government occasion in the Janjgir-Champa region, officials said on Saturday. Kharge will go to the 'Bharose Ka Sammelan' program to be held in Janjgir city at 1:30 pm, they said, adding that chief minister Bhupesh Baghel will likewise stay present.
This will be the second visit of Kharge to the Congress-ruled state in the wake of his expected charge as the AICC chief last October. The visit is viewed as a launch of the Congress' mission for the Chhattisgarh assembly polls, due later this year. Kharge will land at the Master Vivekananda Air Terminal in Raipur at around 12:10 p.m. on Sunday and will leave for Janjgir in a helicopter, an authority said.
In the wake of going to the occasion, he will depart from Raipur for Delhi at 4:20 pm, he said. In the 2018 assembly elections, the Congress, in spite of an avalanche triumph, could win just two of the six seats in the Janjgir-Champa region. Of the rest, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) won two segments each.
In the previous elections, Congress had won 68 of the complete 90 seats in Chhattisgarh, while the BJP finished a far-off second at 15. The JCC (J) bagged five sections, and its partner BSP 2. The Congress right now has 71 members in the House.
Political importance of program
As of now, out of 10 assembly seats reserved for Scheduled Castes (SCs) in Chhattisgarh, 7 are at present with the Congress, two with the BJP, and one with the BSP. Out of these two seats in the SC category, Saraipali and Sarangarh were won by the Congress candidates with a margin of 50,000 votes each. The vast majority of the seats in the Janjgir-Champa district in the state are held for Scheduled Castes.
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