Roadshows get tepid response

ANANTAPUR: Sonia Gandhi’s road show in this district on Wednesday evoked a mixed response from the people.
While the number of people gathered along the 20 km road from here to Marthadu village varied from a handful to a couple of hundreds, it was Congressmen who hogged the roadsides hoping to catch the leader’s eye.
In fact, at one point where Sonia got off her car and walked into a sunflower field to talk to a woman, there was none to interpret.She asked her security personnel to look for state Congress leaders D Srinivas and Y S Rajasekhara Reddy, but they had been nudged to the rear of the convoy by local Congressmen chasing the motorcade in about 150 vehicles.
Finally, when Srinivas and Rajasekhara Reddy arrived, the woman conveyed to Gandhi that her farming family had been making losses for the last four years because of lack of rain.
The road show halted at seven places en route to Marthadu. The response was poor, apparently due to the fact that the local leaders, instead of mobilising people,were busy chasing Gandhi’s car. There were only 20 people at Janasakhi Nagar on National Highway 7, about 100 people where she stopped to pray to a Hanuman idol by the road. At Garladinne, there were about 400 people, most of them high school students.
At Marthedu, Sonia Gandhi assured Hussain Bee, widow of a farmer who had committed suicide, that the Congress would give her a solatium of Rs 20,000 from the party fund. Speaking at Marthedu, where five farmers had committed suicide in the last year, Gandhi said the TDP-BJP combine had no place in its heart for the suffering of farmers, jobless youth and women.
Addressing a gathering of about 10,000, Sonia Gandhi spoke for barely seven minutes, lamenting the plight of farmers and vulnerable section under the TDP and NDA rules and reminded them that “my mother-in-law Indira Gandhi and husband Rajiv Gandhi had a special place in their hearts for Andhra Pradesh. So do I.’’
Sonia interacted with some of the suicide-hit families and recalled her earlier visit to this district: “I was here two years ago when the suicides were reported. The TDP government has failed to alleviate the distress of drought-hit farmers for years.Your heart-rendering stories are a clear indication of the negligence of the rulers.�
On the streets of Nandyal, one saw vehicles with strange numbers: 498 Shilpa, 727 Shilpa and 956 Shilpa. Congress organisers said it showed the number of vehicles hired by each leader.