Former speaker of lok Sabha and presidential candidate of United Progressive Alliance (UPA) Meira Kumar on Friday kick-started her campaign after visiting Mahatma Gandhi founded Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad.
Accompanied by senior Gujarat Congress leaders Kumar paid homage to the father of nation and spun charkha at the historic Ashram a day after Prime Minister visited there. After paying homage to Mahatma, she said that one gets inner power by visiting this place.
“The unity of Opposition is based on ideology that we have learnt from Mahatma Gandhi. So after filing the nomination and scrutiny, the first thing I did was to visit Sabarmati Ashram and pay my respects,” She said while talking to media persons.
At a Press conference convened at Congress party’s State headquarters — Rajiv Gandhi Bhavan, she reiterated that her contest against NDA candidate Ram Nath Kovind would be basically the battle of ideology. The main focus of her campaign would be freedom of speech, equality in society, poverty alleviation and removal of casteism, she said.
Replying a question over the Dalit vs Dalit contest, she said that is ironical that even in 2017 people are being judged by their caste. She also made a remark that in the past presidential polls were fought amongst upper caste candidates but never the issue of caste emerged. ‘’We must criticise the mind set of caste in India. If such elections were fought on basis of racism anywhere in the world, we would have criticised it,’’ she opined.