NEW DELHI: Sending out a clear message to critics within the organisation, Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Monday said self-criticism is needed in party forums but it should not be done to erode self-confidence and morale, as she asserted that it is time “to repay our debt to the party”.

Addressing top Congress leaders at the party’s working committee meeting, she said the Chintan Shivir should not become a ritual and it should herald a restructured organisation to meet the ideological, electoral and managerial challenges ahead.

“Self-criticism is of course needed in our party forums. But this should not be done in a manner that erodes self-confidence and morale and an atmosphere of gloom and doom prevails. To the contrary, we are beholden to put our heads together and together, collectively overcome the challenges that face us,” Gandhi said.

“This requires that the Chintan Shivir (brainstorming session) does not become a ritual, something we must just get through. I am determined that it should herald a restructured organisation to meet the many ideological, electoral and managerial tasks we confront,” she said.

The Congress chief said that “there are no magic wands”. It is only with selfless work, discipline and a sense of consistent collective purpose that “we will demonstrate our tenacity and resilience,” she said.

“The party has been central to the life of each and every one of us. It has expected our total allegiance and has been good to each and every one of us. Now, when we are at a crucial juncture, it is imperative that we step forward and repay our debt to the party in full measure,” Gandhi said at the party’s top decision-making body — Congress Working Committee (CWC) — meeting here.

In a press conference after the CWC meet, Congress leaders Jairam Ramesh and Randeep Surjewala said the aim of the shivir is to prepare a new action plan and road map to get the party battle-ready for the 2024 Lok Sabha and upcoming assembly elections.

“It is not a destination it is the beginning of a long journey. It is a milestone. After each of the Chintan Shivirs, the organisation has undergone transformation, this is a transformation of unprecedented magnitude,” Ramesh said.

He said there are serious challenges before the country, and the Congress and the people expect the party to play a role. “The fact that we are holding the shivir is in itself a message that the Congress president means business.”

Gandhi also talked about the deliberations to be held at the shivir which will be in six different groups – taking up political, economic, social justice, farmers, youth and organisational issues.

The Congress chief said delegates have already been informed about the groups in which they are expected to participate and on May 15, the party will adopt the “Udaipur Nav Sankalp” after it has been approved by the CWC there.

“I request your full cooperation in ensuring that the single over-riding message that goes forth loud and clear from Udaipur is one of unity, cohesion, determination and commitment to our party’s accelerated revival,” she said.

Gandhi said around 400 Congress members will be attending the shivir and stressed on the message of every leader holding one party post. The party has made every effort to ensure a balanced representation from every angle, she said.

Surjewala said the aim is to prepare a new constructive role for the Congress as an opposition party as per people’s aspirations, come true to people’s expectations by internalising transformations and bring forth a new resolve.

“The aim of the Nav Sankalp Shivir is to rise to the expectations of people after bringing about organisational changes, and come out with a new pledge to save the country,” he said, adding, that is why six separate groups were formed to take up the challenges on various fronts.

The conveners of the six groups gave detailed reports and plans, and CWC members discussed these as well as put forth their views, Surjewala said Detailed discussions on all these issues will be held at the session in Udaipur, he said.

Ramesh said the session will help make the Congress a rejuvenated and strengthened party to deal with the political and other challenges before it. Organisational changes will also be an outcome of the shivir, he said.

“We are not going to Udaipur to draft an action plan to strengthen the Congress to deal with the political, economic, social and other challenges,” Ramesh said. He said this is the fourth Chintan Shivir, after the ones in Pachmarhi in 1998, in Shimla in 2003 and in January 2013 in Jaipur.

Fifty per cent of the delegates for the upcoming shivir are below 50 years of age and around 35 per cent are below 40 years. Twenty-one per cent are women, representing different sections of society, Surjewala said.

CWC members, including special and permanent invitees, state presidents, CLP leaders, former Union ministers, AICC secretaries and joint secretaries, all MPs, presidents of various AICC cells and departments, all national office-bearers of party wings, besides 50 party leaders who are part of the coordination panel or selected by party chief, are among the 422 invitees for the session, he said.

At the meet, the CWC approved an amendment in the party constitution to include digital membership and decided that Ladakh will have a separate Congress territorial wing.

NEW DELHI: With 2,288 new coronavirus infections reported in a day, India’s tally of COVID-19 cases rose to 4,31,07,689, while the active cases decreased to 19,637, according to the Union Health Ministry data updated on Tuesday.

The active cases comprise 0.05 per cent of the total infections, while the national COVID-19 recovery rate was 98.74 per cent, the ministry said.

A decrease of 766 cases has been recorded in the active COVID-19 caseload in a span of 24 hours.

The daily positivity rate was recorded as 0.47 per cent and the weekly positivity rate as 0.79 per cent, according to the ministry.

The number of people who have recuperated from the disease surged to 4,25,63,949, while the case fatality rate was 1.22 per cent.

The cumulative doses administered in the country so far under the nationwide COVID-19 vaccination drive has exceeded 190.50 crore.

India’s COVID-19 tally had crossed the 20-lakh mark on August 7, 2020, 30 lakh on August 23, 40 lakh on September 5 and 50 lakh on September 16.

It went past 60 lakh on September 28, 70 lakh on October 11, crossed 80 lakh on October 29, 90 lakh on November 20 and surpassed the one-crore mark on December 19.

The country crossed the grim milestone of two crore on May 4 and three crore on June 23 last year.

The 10 new fatalities include six from Kerala, three from Delhi and one from Karnataka.

UZHHOROD: US first lady Jill Biden made an unannounced visit to western Ukraine on Sunday, holding a surprise Mother’s Day meeting with the nation’s first lady, Olena Zelenskyy, as Russia presses its punishing war in the eastern regions.

“I wanted to come on Mother’s Day,” Biden told Zelenskyy. “I thought it was important to show the Ukrainian people that this war has to stop and this war has been brutal and that the people of the United States stand with the people of Ukraine.”

The first lady travelled by vehicle to the town of Uzhhorod, about a 10-minute drive from a Slovakian village that borders Ukraine.

The two came together in a small classroom, sitting across a table from one another and talking before reporters before they met in private.

Zelenskyy and her children have been at an undisclosed location for their safety.

Zelenskyy thanked Biden for her “courageous act” and said, “We understand what it takes for the US first lady to come here during a war when military actions are taking place every day, where the air sirens are happening every day — even today.”

The school where they met has been turned into transitional housing for Ukrainian migrants from elsewhere in the country.

The visit allowed Biden to conduct the kind of personal diplomacy that her husband would like to be doing himself.

President Joe Biden said during his visit to Poland in March that he was disappointed he could not visit Ukraine to see conditions “firsthand” but that he was not allowed, likely due to security reasons.

The White House said as recently as last week that the president “would love to visit” but there were no plans for him to do so at this time.

The meeting came about after the two first ladies exchanged correspondence in recent weeks, according to US officials who declined to provide further details because they were not authorized to discuss the ladies’ private communications.

As she arrived at the school, Biden, who was wearing a Mother’s Day corsage that was a gift from her husband, embraced Zelenskyy and presented her with a bouquet.

After their private meeting, the two joined a group of children who live at the school in making tissue-paper bears to give as Mother’s Day gifts.

Jill Biden’s visit follows recent stops in the war-torn country by US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of Congress, as well as a joint trip by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to meet with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. Her visit was limited to western Ukraine; Russia is concentrating its military power in eastern Ukraine, and she was not in harm’s way.

Earlier, in the Slovakian border village of Vysne Nemecke, she toured its border processing facility, surveying operations set up by the United Nations and other relief organizations to assist Ukrainians seeking refuge.

Biden attended a religious service in a tent set up as a chapel, where a priest intoned, “We pray for the people of Ukraine.”

Before that, in Kosice, Biden met and offered support to Ukrainian mothers in Slovakia who have been displaced by Russia’s war and assuring them that the “hearts of the American people” are behind them.

At a bus station in the city that is now a 24-hour refugee processing center, Biden found herself in an extended conversation with a Ukrainian woman who said she struggles to explain the war to her three children because she cannot understand it herself.

“I cannot explain because I don’t know myself and I’m a teacher,” Victorie Kutocha, who had her arms around her 7-year-old daughter, Yulie, told Biden.

At one point, Kutocha asked, “Why?” seeming to seek an explanation for Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine on Feb 24. “It’s so hard to understand,” the first lady replied.

The 24-hour facility is one of six refugee centers in Slovakia, providing an average of 300 to 350 people daily with food, showers, clothing, emergency on-site accommodations and other services, according to information provided by the White House.

Biden also dropped in at a Slovakian public school that has taken in displaced students. Slovakian and Ukrainian moms were brought together at the school for a Mother’s Day event while their children made crafts to give them as gifts.

Biden went from table to table meeting the mothers and kids. She told some of the women that she wanted to come and “say the hearts of the American people are with the mothers of Ukraine.”

“I just wanted to come and show you our support,” she said before departing for Vysne Nemecke.

In recent weeks border crossings are averaging less than 2,000 per day, down from over 10,000 per day immediately after Russia’s invasion on Feb.24, and a large portion of that flow is daily cross border traffic.

Biden is on a four-day visit to Eastern Europe to highlight US support for Ukrainian refugees and for the allied countries such as Romania and Slovakia that are providing a safe haven for them. She spent Friday and Saturday in Romania, visiting with US troops and meeting with Ukrainian refugee mothers and children.

With her trip, the American first lady followed the path of prior sitting first ladies who also travelled to war or conflict zones.

Eleanor Roosevelt visited servicemen abroad during World War II to help boost troop morale.

Pat Nixon joined President Richard Nixon on his 1969 trip to South Vietnam, becoming the first first lady to visit a combat zone, according to the National First Ladies’ Library. She flew 18 miles from Saigon in an open helicopter, accompanied by US Secret Service agents.

Hillary Clinton visited a combat zone, stopping in Bosnia in 1996. Four years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and during the US-led war in Afghanistan, Laura Bush went to Kabul in 2005 and Melania Trump accompanied President Donald Trump to Iraq in December 2018.

BENGALURU : The Congress party’s digital membership has turned into a morale booster for the grand old party in Karnataka as over 78 lakh people have enrolled which is 30 per cent of the 2.6 crore members across the country for the party and almost 15 per cent of the total electorates, about 5.2 crore in the state.

Through the process, the party has touched almost all the 58,186 booths in 224 Assembly constituencies across the State and over 2.2 lakh party workers were reportedly involved in it with great enthusiasm. The party, which is struggling to revive, with senior leader Rahul Gandhi touring Telangana for a couple of days, is likely to use the data to bolster its base, besides strengthening its cadre on the lines of the BJP.

It is also likely to share the data with its election strategists, in the wake of 2024 LS polls, and appointed Sunil Kanugol, who joined AICC unconditionally in March first week, as Karnataka in charge for 2023 assembly polls.

The data collected by visiting doorsteps of the members have been broken up into demographic components like caste, age, gender which will help analyse it in the long run and target the groups with information.

There are about 56 per cent youths aged below 40 and 40 per cent women out of 78 lakh who have enrolled digitally, sources said. “We will also set up the 12-member committees in each booth and create the WhatsApp groups to share all the area specific information and also about the programmes of the Congress party including the manifesto.

The data will help the party strengthen its cadre,” remarked Raghunandan Ramanna, chief co-ordinator for the digital membership. “Karnataka is first in the digital membership followed by Telangana which has over 40 lakh. I do not know how authentic the digital membership of other parties are including the BJP’s,” he claimed.

AHMEDABAD:  Despite tall claims of some Gujarat BJP leaders that the party has no rival in the 
upcoming Assembly polls, the ruling party is taking all precautions to avoid a repeat of 2017 when it had to content with a simple majority.

In the 182-member Gujarat Assembly, the party won 99 seats in 2017 against the 115 seats it had bagged in 2012. On the contrary, the opposition Congress improved its tally to 77 from the previous 61.  The saffron party is expected to focus vigorously on the 16 seats which it had won narrowly.

A senior BJP leader, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “We have drawn up an action plan to strengthen booths in the constituencies where the winning margin was less than 3,000 votes in 2017. Also, there is a parallel plan to bring strong Congress leaders into the party in these constituencies.”

Stating that booth management was the key to BJP’s victory, the party leader said they would seek the cooperation of social workers and religious leaders in the low-margin booths.

“A few days ago, party general secretary BL Santosh had a meeting with senior party leaders, in which RSS office-bearers were also present. A special strategy has been drawn up to retain the seats which were won by us with a narrow margin, and to win the seats which were bagged by Congress with a narrow margin,” the party leader said.

To retain its weaker seats, the saffron party has started constituency-wise surveys to assess the performance of the sitting MLAs, sentiments of voters and the problems faced by them. After the survey, which is being prepared by a private agency, a report will be handed over to the leadership.

Lucknow: BJP MP Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh on Thursday opposed Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray’s visit to Ayodhya on June 5 and warned that he will not be allowed to enter the city till he tendered a public apology for humiliating north Indians.

Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, MP from Kaiserganj Lok Sabha constituency and one of the leaders of the Ram Mandir movement, in a tweet said, Will not allow Raj Thackeray, who humiliates north Indians, enter the Ayodhya border .

Before coming to Ayodhya, Raj Thackeray should apologise to all North Indians with folded hands, he said.

In a series of tweets, the MP also requested Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath not to meet Thackeray till he apologised to the North Indians.

I request Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath ji not to meet Raj Thackeray until he publicly apologises to the North Indians, he said.

The MP also said that the Thackeray family had no contribution in the temple movement.

“From the movement for Ram temple to its construction only Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the common man have had a role. The Thackeray family has no role in it,” he said.

Brij Bhushan was also an accused in the controversial Babri Mosque case, which was felled by kar sevaks in Ayodhya on December 6, 1992.

On April 17, Thackeray in Pune had announced he would visit Ayodhya on June 5 to seek blessings of Lord Ram.

“On June 5, I will go to Ayodhya along with other MNS workers to have darshan of Lord Ram. I appeal to other people also to come to Ayodhya,” Thackeray had said in a press conference.

I have not gone out for a long time , was his reply when asked about the purpose of his visit.

Speaking to the media later at the event, Thackeray questioned RSS’ contribution too in the temple movement.

“How many kar sevaks’ lost their lives for this? It is because of the Supreme Court and the central government that the Ram temple is being established there. So I want to go there in the early stages (of construction). Later, once the temple is ready, everyone will visit it again,” he said.