On a rainy day when the Valley was freezing, 29-year-old Yasin Ahmed Pandit had been waiting anxiously since morning for his turn to go inside the J-K Congress headquarters here. A Botany post-graduate, Pandit had not come for a job: he was here for a special interview to become a Youth Congress leader.

The talent hunt, a brainchild of Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi, has to pick suitable candidates for the party’s youth wing across the country. And on Monday, the talent hunt was held in Srinagar where senior leaders conducted interviews amid tight security. Around 200 young men and women responded to the talent hunt call and arrived at the party headquarters — a departure from Kashmir’s turbulent past when it was a political taboo to even walk into the Congress headquarters.

“I am hopeful of getting into the Congress youth wing in Jammu and Kashmir,” said Pandit, a resident of Dalgate Srinagar, while coming out. “They (interviewer) asked me why I wanted to join the Congress. I told them I had a dream to be part of the party which gives priority to ‘worth’ and not ‘birth’. This is a country where a member borne to a Sikh family can become Prime Minister due his worth. The worth is the priority in the Congress.”

Fayaz Ahmed, 22, a computer graduate, is also hopeful of making it to Rahul’s young team in the Valley. “I may be too young for politics, but I have a desire to be part of the party that is keen to accommodate the young people from across the country,” Ahmed said. “We had been waiting for the talent hunt for a long time.”

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