Adilabad: The Congress is now flavouring its election campaign with poetry and using the ‘Mushairas’ to drive home the message to voters that it is a better bet than the ruling TRS.
The party has roped in popular shayar (poet) Imran Prathapgarhi of New Delhi to reach out to the Muslim voters in the Assembly constituencies where the community has a higher population.
Imran Prathapgarphi’s poetry on divisive politics being practised by political parties and his stress on humanity has been received very well across the country. The poet was in Nirmal town on October 1 and the mushaira was well-attended by Muslim voters and Congress leaders like Mohd Ali Shabbir, Fakruddin and Amir Ali Khan and TD leader Ali Masqati, along with former MLA Aleti Maheshwar Reddy and Adilabad Congress Minority Cell president Sajid Khan.
Happy with the reception the Mushaira got, the Congress has decided to organise similar events with the theme being anti-BJP and promotion of secularism. Source say that the party is planning many mushairas in Hyderabad to take on the BJP, TRS and the MIM.
Through his poetry Imran Prathapgarhi touched upon TRS government’s promises of 2BHK housing, super-speciality hospitals in all the Assembly Constituencies, 12 per cent reservations for Muslim etc. The poet said that the TRS government failed to fulfil its promises and emphases that a vote to the TRS was nothing but a vote to the BJP.
He also mentioned the friendship between TRS president K. Chandrasekhar Rao and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and called upon the people to defeat both the TRS in Telangana and Modi at the Centre to preserve secularism and Hindu-Muslim unity and called upon the people to fight against communal politics and resist attempts to divide the society on religious lines.
Imran Prathapgarhi said he had met the Congress president Rahul Gandhi and asked him about the party’s stand on the Triple Talaq Bill before it was introduced in Parliament. He said that Mr Gandhi told him that they can’t stop the Bill from being passed in the Lok Sabha but would stop it in Rajya Sabha.
Mr Sajid Khan said, “Imran Pratapgarhi had campaigned in favour of Congress against the MIM in Nanded Municipal Corporation elections in 2017 where the Congress fared well.”
Mr Maheshwar Reddy hopes to get the Congress ticket from Nirmal and he is now focusing on Muslim votes after realising the fact that he lost the last election to Indrakaran Reddy in 2014 as he failed to attract the community. Indrakaran Reddy won on a BSP ticket and later joined the TRS. Nirmal constituency has a population of about 30,000 Muslims.
