Rahul Gandhi among UPA speakers during Trust vote



Congress' heir apparent Rahul Gandhi will be one of the key speakers of the party during the debate on tomorrow's confidence motion in which Leader of Opposition L K Advani is also expected to participate.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will move the motion in the Lok Sabha with a one-line motion -- That this House expresses its confidence in the Council of Ministers -- with an opening speech.

He is expected to highlight the performance of his four-year-old government and emphasise how and why the Indo-US nuclear deal is beneficial to the country in the long term.

At the end of the two-day debate, he is also expected to reply to it before the motion is put to vote.

Rahul Gandhi, along with top leaders of the Congress as also its supporting parties are expected to participate in the discussion. These include Congress Ministers P Chidambaram, Kapil Sibal and Saifuddin Soz, and RJD chief Lalu Prasad, who was part of the UPA-Left Coordination Committee.

Other Union Ministers Kapil Sibal, Vayalar Ravi, Ram Vilas Paswan, Pawan Kumar Bansal, Anand Sharma, Praful Patel, M Ramadass, Sachin Pilot, Krishna Tirath and Kanimozhi will also speak on the behalf of the UPA.

External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the Leader of Lok Sabha, could be intervening in the two-day long discussion.

On the eve of the Trust motion, National Security Adviser M K Narayanan and Foreign Secretary Shivshankar Menon briefed most of the UPA speakers, including Rahul Gandhi, on the intricate details of nuclear deal to prepare them well for the debate.