Instead of waiting till the assembly elections are announced, the Congress wants to unleash its young and famous MPs across the state to rejuvenate the party. The Youth Congress, which Rahul Gandhi oversees, is part of the drive.

'The party is carving out a strategy to use young MPs to tour the state in a phased manner to mobilise party workers and take the message and work of the party to the voters,' Nadeem Javed, national general secretary of the Youth Congress, told IANS.

Javed said that Sachin Pilot, Jitin Prasada, Jyotiraditya Scindia as well as former Indian cricket captain Mohammad Azharuddin will be among those who will travel to all parts of Uttar Pradesh.

And so will Rahul Gandhi, widely considered the architect of the surprise Congress victory in the Lok Sabha battle.

With a rainbow coalition of Dalits, Muslims and Brahmins, the Congress had ruled the state since independence until 1967 when it lost power for the first time. It was voted out again in 1977.

The Congress returned to office in 1980 and ruled until 1989 when a cocktail of Hindu nationalist and caste-based politics severely eroded its support base.

In no time the Congress became an also-ran, struggling to win even 30 seats in an assembly where it once ruled the roost.

All that changed dramatically in the recent Lok Sabha elections when the Congress, guided by Rahul Gandhi, emerged the second largest party winning 21 seats, just one seat behind the Samajwadi Party.

The ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) finished third while the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won only 10 seats.

The Congress hopes to repeat this feat in the assembly elections. For this the party plans to wrap up organisational elections by December 2009.

(Khalid Akhter can be contacted at khalid.a@ians.in)