Churn in the Congress
A day after senior Congress leader and former Union Minister Jairam Ramesh said that the opposition has missed a trick by constantly being negative against the Modi government and by demonising the Prime Minister, another senior leader of the party has agreed with his views.
On Twitter, Congress national spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said that demonising Modi is wrong and the opposition should always be fair in its criticism. He concurred with Ramesh and pointed out the Ujjwala scheme as one of the big successes of the Modi government.
These set of comments come at a time when massive churn is happening inside the grand old party. Congress was split vertically over Article 370 with many believing that the party is not in tune with the pulse of the nation by opposing its abrogation. Now, again question marks are being raised over Congress' strategy as an opposition party. In the last few years particularly in the run-up to the elections, the Congress ran a shrill campaign targeting the Prime Minister with Rahul Gandhi going hammer and tongs over Rafale among other issues.
But clearly, such line of attack had very little effect as BJP bettered its 2014 tally to breach the 300 mark. But the Congress top leadership is still mostly fixated about attacking Modi and now senior members of the party are indirectly questioning the efficacy of that line of attack. Only time will tell if their criticism lead to any change in party's strategy.
1. What did Abhishek Manu Singhvi say?
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Singhvi tweeted:
Always said demonising #Modi wrong. No only is he #PM of nation, a one way opposition actually helps him. Acts are always good, bad & indifferent—they must be judged issue wise and nt person wise. Certainly, #ujjawala scheme is only one amongst other good deeds. #Jairamramesh
— Abhishek Singhvi (@DrAMSinghvi) August 23, 2019
He said, " Always said demonising #Modi wrong. No only is he #PM of nation, a one way opposition actually helps him. Acts are always good, bad & indifferent—they must be judged issue wise and nt person wise. Certainly, #ujjawala scheme is only one amongst other good deeds. #Jairamramesh" (sic)
Later he tweeted about Parle G allegedly laying off 10,000 staffers owing to lack of sales and said that youth are having tough time owing to unemployment. Hence Singhvi implicitly made it clear that he would like the opposition to focus on economy rather than launching ad-hominem attacks on PM Modi and schemes launched by the Centre.
2. Jairam Ramesh's contrarian take
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Jairam Ramesh said it was time to recognise that Modi’s governance model wasn’t a ‘complete negative story’ and that ‘demonizing him all the time is not going to help’.
He said: “He (PM Modi) talks in a language that connects him with the people. Unless we recognize that he is doing things which people recognise and which have not been done in the past, we are not going to be able to confront this guy.”
"Let me tell you it is not a completely negative story when it comes to economics of the governance, the politics of the governance is completely different".
On the Pradhan Mantri Ujwala Yojana he said: “In 2019, all of us in the political discourse made fun of one or two of his programmes, but it has turned out in all electoral studies that the PMUJ is one single program which has been able to connect him with crores and crores of women and given him the political traction which he didn't have in 2014.”
3. Sonia Gandhi though continues to attack government
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Interim Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Thursday said that former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi never used his powers to create "an atmosphere of fear or to destroy the freedom and liberty of the people in the country".
"Rajiv Gandhi came to power in 1984 but he never used power to create an atmosphere of fear or to destroy the freedom and liberty of the people. He never used his power to put the principles of democracy in danger," she said at an event to mark the 75th birth anniversary of the former Prime Minister.
Congress leaders including Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra have strongly backed Chidambaram and accused the BJP-led government of pursuing "vendetta politics".
Gandhi did not take any names but made several veiled attacks on the government.
"There are those who are busy in inventing a new past for us. Rajiv Gandhi was inventing a new future. To him, past had to be understood in all its complexities to building pride and not prejudice, to strengthen social harmony and not fuel antagonism and polarise our society," she said.
