By IANS
Rae Bareli (Uttar Pradesh) : Congress president Sonia Gandhi has been meeting party workers and urging them to gear up for the 2009 Lok Sabha polls during her three-day visit to her constituency here.
Gandhi, scheduled to return to New Delhi Wednesday, was busy meeting local Congressmen in different assembly segments of the parliamentary constituency, which has been the political bastion of her family for decades.
This is her first visit to Rae Bareli after the Congress' debacle in the Uttar Pradesh assembly elections in May.
"You need not wait for the official notification for the next Lok Sabha elections; please pull up your socks from now," she told party workers wherever she went.
She also took the opportunity to impress upon her electorate that Pratibha Patil's nomination to the country's highest chair was a "fulfilment of Rajiv Gandhi's dream for women's empowerment".
"Get down to ensuring that every voter's name is duly included in the electoral roll and that every voter has a photo identify card. Those who do not have ration cards must promptly apply for one," she stressed.
The Congress chief also made it a point to tell her party workers to travel to the remotest corners of the constituency and inform people about the achievements of the United Progressive Alliance government at the centre.
Gandhi did not mince words in blaming her own party rank and file for the poor performance in the assembly polls. "Not only was there absence of unity among the workers, but there was also lack of coordination and total communication gap between leaders and workers, which resulted in the poor showing," she pointed out.
Earlier, she chaired a meeting of the Central Vigilance Monitoring Committee that took up complaints regarding loopholes and pilferage in the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (NREGP).
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