A day after the results of crucial elections to Uttar Pradesh and four other states, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will immediately get into the next big campaign with a two-day visit to home turf Gujarat beginning March 11. The State goes to the polls in December 2022.
In his first major public outing to Gujarat after the long-drawn Covid-19 crisis, Modi will simultaneously straddle the rural and urban regions by first presiding over a huge State-level Panchayati raj sammelan at the sprawling GMDC Grounds in Ahmedabad.
Thousands of village sarpanches and representatives from rural-level government institutions are expected to remain present at the event. All preparations are being directly monitored by Gujarat BJP President CR Paatil and Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel.
The Prime Minister is also expected to inaugurate a few key projects of the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) during his stay on March 11 and March 12.
In a jam-packed schedule, Narendra Modi would also be present at the Khel Mahakumbh, a state-level sports festival to identify and encourage young talents that he had initiated during his time as the Chief Minister of Gujarat.
The festival will be kicked off from the Sardar Patel Stadium in Ahmedabad. Minister of State for Home Harsh Sanghavi, who also holds the independent charge of Sports and Cultural Affairs Department, is personally supervising preparations for the event. Sources believe the Prime Minister will utilise the event to reach out to his favourite constituency — the youth — through the Khel Mahakumbh address.
The Prime Minister will also address the convocation ceremony of the Raksha Shakti University in Gandhinagar. Modi had established the university as the chief minister in 2009. It runs with the motto of providing exclusive quality education in all spheres of security. Internal and external security have always been Modi’s priority both as the chief minister and now as the PM.
As always, the Prime Minister will also call on his centenarian mother, Heera Ba, who lives with his brother Pankaj Modi in Sargasan in Gandhinagar.
Modi’s Gujarat tour had to be postponed a couple of times earlier in recent times. He was to inaugurate the biennial ambitious Vibrant Gujarat Global Investors Summit in January this year, which had to be put off in view of the third wave of Covid-19. The Prime Minister was to be at the Defence Expo in March, which was also deferred apparently in view of the Russia-Ukraine crisis.
