Once Indira Gandhi’s comeback seat, Chikmagalur to welcome Rahul Gandhi today.

NewDelhi: Congress chief Rahul Gandhi will visit Karnataka’s Chikmagalur district – a place from where his grandmother and former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had scripted her political comeback.

Rahul’s Chikmagalur visit is part of the campaign for the upcoming Karnataka Assembly elections.

Apart from meeting senior party leaders in Mangalore, Rahul will also visit Sharadamba Temple in Sringeri and also meet Jagadguru Shankaracharya of Sringeri Mutt. Later in the afternoon, he will address two public meetings.

In a hard-hitting attack on the BJP, the Congress president had on Tuesday accused it of spreading violence, forming governments using money and dividing the country for the sake of power.

Embarking on the third round of his campaign tour in poll-bound Karnataka, he also lashed out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi charging him with “insulting” the common man by claiming credit for the country’s progress.

“They will do anything for power. Modi ji will come and repeatedly lie,” Rahul said, addressing public meetings in the coastal Udupi and Dakshina Kannada districts, considered the stronghold of the BJP.

Rahul’s Chikmagalur visit is significant since his grandmother Indira Gandhi had visited the place when she was not even a Member of Parliament. 

Indira had contested the Lok Sabha bypolls from Chikmagalur in 1978 and had subsequently won from there, making a political comeback at the time when the Congress was down in dumps after the imposition of emergency. She had defeated Janata party’s Veerendra Patil.

DB Chandre Gowda, a Congress loyalist, had vacated his parliamentary seat for Indira.

Chikmagalur was a Congress stronghold until then. Two years later she returned as the PM of India dislodging the Janata Party government.

Here is Rahul Gandhi’s schedule:-