Congress corners rights for Jai Ho

The Congress is gung-ho about Jai Ho the Oscar winning song by AR Rehman from the hugely feted movie Slumdog Millionaire.

With an eye of using it in its central election campaign for the 2009 polls, the Congress party has bought the rights of Jai Ho from T-Series for an undisclosed sum of money and now no other political party or agency would be able to to use it for either their campaign or advertising.

A legal notice has also been served on Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi for using the slogan Jai Ho, after the party bought the rights to the song and the tune.

Sources said that while this would not be the key slogan of the party, the music and the tune would be used in their advertising campaign.

The song has come to symbolize hope over despair, achievement over failure and after the huge publicity it has received in the wake of the BAFTA awards, the Oscars, the Congress hopes it would begin with an advantage which it wants to build on.

It is learnt that the party had approached AR Rehman to compose a special song for them for their election campaign but the music maestro had declined on the plea that he did not have time and would not be able to meet the party's deadline. As second choice, the Congress decided to appropriate for itself the stupendous success of  Slumdog Millionaire, which a senior leader says is the ultimate triumph of a have not (read aam admi) fighting against the odds and coming out on top.

The bulk of the party's publicity and campaign is now being managed by Jairam Ramesh and even the publicity committee headed by Digvijay Singh, which has Rahul Gandhi as a member is now under Ramesh who as the co-ordinator is in charge.