Cong ready for Assembly polls & our manifesto is being prepared: Subhash Chopra

With Delhi elections, round the corner, Congress party has geared up and claims the party is prepared for the forthcoming elections. Speaking to Millennium Post, Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee (DPCC) president Subhash Chopra tells Nikita Jain about the issues and schemes the grand old party will be focusing on this elections.

Excerpts:

What will be the main election issues the Congress will be focusing on? What will Congress manifesto look like?

This current government has done nothing for the welfare of the people. So, for elections, we are fully prepared to expose them. At the moment, we are just preparing the manifesto. I had already announced a subsidy scheme of free electricity till 600 units and that all senior citizens and widows and disabled citizens will receive Rs 5,000 every month. So, this will affect about six lakh families in Delhi. They talk about making of senior citizen centres, we want that their families should give respect to them. This scheme was started by late Srimati Sheila Dixit ji and we started with Rs 200 and we went up to Rs 2,500. This scheme will be called Sheila Yojana. Because she was the person, who created Delhi, so this is our homage to the late chief minister. So, the idea was that every family should take care of senior citizens. The reason behind giving Rs 5,000 to senior citizens is that during our time the Budget for Delhi was Rs 36,000 crore, now it has gone up to Rs 62,000 crore. So, the budget is double and everything is costly now. And I think we know how to manage that Budget.

Few issues that AAP has focused on are free electricity and water...

At our time, theft was about 67 per cent, it has come down to seven per cent. So, it is Rs 6,000 to Rs 8,000 crore now. Why are they then giving this money to private electric companies? Discom has no business here. Even in their manifesto, Discoms mentioned that they will transfer this money to TRANSCO, which is, government-owned. If we give the same money to the consumer, I think with the same amount we can get a subsidy of up to Rs 600.

Reports came out that this election; we might see a lot of old faces from the party?

Our top priority will be visibility. I am going to encourage young people to come forward. But to only those people who are working for Congress. It is not that if somebody is close to someone, I am not going to consider those people. I am going to consider only those who work for the welfare of the people, who are there for the people and work for the party.

What strategies do you have right now and if Congress comes to power, how are you planning to go about it?

There are people who ask me that Kejriwal has been here since the last five years, and provided free bus rides to women, when we took over as the government in Delhi, there was no electricity. People were just getting electricity for eight to ten hours a day; there was no water in Delhi. We started with the privatisation of electricity, then we gave Rs 240 crore to Haryana government to make a canal in Delhi. So, that's how water and electricity were provided to Delhiites. That time our priority was Metro, it was flyovers, hospitals, schools and universities and we did all that. We were the people who made Delhi as one of the best Capital of the world. All credit goes to the Congress government of that time. Our late leader Sheila ji had a vision. And with that vision, we achieved whatever was required in Delhi. This fellow has not done anything since the past six years. He could not patch up the roads and is just spending money here and there. He came with a motive of implementing Jan Lok Pal Bill, but never pursued it. A person who said he will not take any government accommodation, security or vehicle, but he started using everything.

With recent events that took place in Jamia...

This was the most tragic thing; every citizen of this country has a right to demonstrate. Who are these children? They are our children, any student studying in Jamia Millia is a child of Subhash Chopra, and is also the child of the nation. Children studying in the library were beaten up brutally, so this is the worst thing that could have happened in Delhi. And why are we against CAA, it is because they want to play with our Constitution. They wanted to do something on a religious basis, which is why Congress was the first party who opposed it. We will not allow them to do something like this in the country.