Sheila Dikshit Congress's CM candidate in UP

Move to appoint Dikshit comes at the insistence of election strategist Prashant Kishor

The Congress party announced 78-year-old former Delhi chief minister Sheila Dikshit as its CM candidate for the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls that are due by early 2017. With the announcement, three of the four major players in those polls now have CM faces – Mayawati for the Bahujan Samaj Party and incumbent Akhilesh Yadav for the Samajwadi Party being the others. This could put pressure on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to declare its CM candidate.

Since its 2014 Lok Sabha victory, the BJP has lost to regional players in assembly polls and especially when faced with a credible CM face, as in Delhi and Bihar. In Delhi, it didn’t have a credible enoughface to rival the Aam Aadmi Party’s Arvind Kejriwal. In Bihar it was apprehensive of infighting between competing leaders. There is a similar dilemma in UP. What could also worry the BJP is the Congress effort to reclaim a Brahmin support base in UP.

Dikshit calls herself “UP ki bahu (UP’s daughter-in-law)” and is a Brahmin face. She is from Punjabi Khatri family of Delhi but was married to the son of former Union home minister Uma Shankar Dikshit. Close to the Nehru-Gandhis, Uma Shankar was considered one of the tallest Brahmin leaders of the Congress from UP. The community is 10-12 per cent of UP voters. In recent years, Brahmins have gravitated to the BJP. The community had supported the BSP in the 2007 assembly polls.

However, the Congress, at least since 1990, isn’t the force it once was in UP. It has performed miserably in recent elections. Of the 403 assembly seats, it won a poor 28 in the 2012 polls. In the 2014 election, it could win only two of the 80 Lok Sabha seats – of the Gandhi family pocket boroughs of Amethi, represented by party vice-president Rahul Gandhi, and Rae Bareli that sent party president Sonia Gandhi to the Lok Sabha.

The move to appoint Dikshit comes at the urging of election strategist Prashant Kishor. It also comes after Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Sonia's daughter, was unwilling to heed the demand by the party’s rank and file that she be the party’s CM face. After the announcement by UP in-charge Ghulam Nabi Azad, Dikshit said the election was likely to be difficult. “She (Priyanka) is a very popular leader. My plea would be that she campaign across the state," Dikshit said.

The Congress plans to project Dikshit as somebody who turned around Delhi in her 15-year tenure as Cm in the capital and who has a clean record. Announcement of Dikshit's name came, however, on the same day the Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) of the Delhi government sent a notice to her to join the investigation in connection with an alleged Rs 400-crore water tanker scam. “I have never been accused of any kind of corruption. The allegations are politically motivated," she said.

Dikshit might come across as a sacrificial lamb but the Congress attempt is to replicate its success of the 2009 Lok Sabha, where it had won 21 Lok Sabha seats. It had then won several seats in the region of central UP, which has a sizable Brahmin population, including Unnao, Farrukhabad and Kanpur. Uma Shankar Dikshit had hailed from Unnao.

Earlier this week, the Congress had appointed Rajya Sabha member Raj Babbar as the chief of its UP unit. Today, the party announced coordination and campaign committees for Uttar Pradesh, to be headed by Sanjay Singh and Pramod Tiwari, respectively.