Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi may be well above 40 years of age, but his party activists on Friday insisted on disallowing anybody above 35 to enter the venue of a Youth Congress meet convened by him in Varanasi.
Rahul had called an open house session with Youth Congress activists at the Garwa Ghat Ashram on the banks of the Ganga River, where he concluded his two-day tour of Eastern UP. However, the entry to the venue was restricted to those who carried their respective birth certificates or any other proof to establish that they were below 35 years of age. Around 3000 youth attended the meet amid tight security.
While lambasting the Mayawati government on various counts, he called upon activists to pull up their socks and prepare themselves for the state assembly elections slated for 2012.
Although the meet was out of bounds for the media, local Congress spokesperson Dharmendra Singh said, "Rahul asked us to form a five member team of Youth Congress workers for every booth in each of the 403 assembly constituencies spread across the state."
Apart from lambasting Chief Minister Mayawati for large scale financial irregularities in the implementation of
Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and National Rural Health Mission, Rahul also accused the state government of "forcibly acquiring agricultural land of innocent farmers and doling it out to the powerful and affluent lobby of builders."
He expressed hope that the Youth Congress would spread out across the length and breadth of the state and its activists would actually get down to fulfilling the party's mission of stamping out corruption from the state.
