The Congress is preparing a door-to-door campaign in Dalit villages across Uttar Pradesh’s reserved constituencies, hoping to win back a support base it lost long ago and avoid embarrassment in the 2017 assembly election. The drive is due to begin on December 4 and run for 45 days.

The plan

Under the programme, 85 teams of party leaders will cover 2,800 villages, each with a Dalit population of more than 500. The party had first planned to send 200 teams to 8,500 Dalit villages statewide, but narrowed the focus to settlements within the 85 constituencies reserved for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. These seats are spread across 66 of the state’s 75 districts.

Each team will include members of different Dalit sub-castes and will spend a day in every village, holding public meetings, garlanding statues of Ambedkar and asking residents to back the Congress. A local “team host” has already been chosen in each village to act as the party’s contact point. The teams will highlight what earlier Congress governments did for the community, portray the BSP, BJP and SP as anti-Dalit, and record people’s expectations from the next government, which may feed into the party’s manifesto.

The party will also map the villages and identify influential upper-caste figures who could be approached during the campaign.

An uphill task

The effort looks ambitious. The Congress has been on the margins of UP politics for about three decades, and its once-loyal Dalit voters have largely moved to the BSP and other parties, with the BJP also competing for them. A senior Congress leader acknowledged that an early review found the party lacked even potential candidates for the reserved seats.

What happened next

In the 2017 Uttar Pradesh assembly election, the BJP won 312 seats, the Samajwadi Party 47 and the BSP 19. Yogi Adityanath became chief minister.

See also: Indian National Congress and constituencies

Originally published on 2 December 2016. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.

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