New Delhi: In his last address to the 17th and the current Lok Sabha Monday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi tried to corner the Congress by quoting from two speeches made by former Indian prime ministers Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.
To keep the momentum of its attack going, the government has also extended the Parliament session by one more day, till 10 February, to discuss a white paper on the state of the Indian economy under the Congress rule.
Replying to the ‘Motion of Thanks’ on the President’s address, Modi told the House that the two former PMs had portrayed Indians as being “lazy, lacking in intelligence and having a defeatist attitude”. He was quoting from two speeches — a 1959 address by Nehru and a 1974 speech by Indira.
“That is what people from the royal family of the Congress thought of my countryman,” he said, also accusing the party of disrespecting OBC icon Karpoori Thakur “by not giving him the status of the Leader of Opposition post in 1987”.
Frequently targeting Nehru and his daughter Indira has been a strategy of Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) since 2014. But with the general election mere months away, BJP sources told ThePrint that the party has also sent circulars to its state units asking them to bring out a “fact sheet on Congress’s blunders” since 1947 — whether it has to do with the Partition, the 1962 war with China, the policy on Kashmir and Article 370, or the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
This appears to fit in quite well with its other strategy — pitting its own achievements over the past 10 years against that of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) between 2004 and 2014.
A senior BJP leader, who wished to not be named, told ThePrint, that the party has asked its state units to not only publicise this government’s achievements but also make references to India’s post-Independence history to show “what the Congress has done to the country”.
Significantly, Modi has claimed that the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) will secure over 400 seats in the election, with the BJP alone winning 370 of these.
“People get easily bored when we only speak about development and growth done in the past 10 years. But when you present a growth chart comparing the Modi government with the UPA, it gets more traction. Similarly, people get used to speeches about the decline of the Congress and its present leadership, but the BJP gets more traction when it refers to Congress’s powerful prime ministers Nehru or Indira Gandhi, who still have high recall values,” the BJP leader said.
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BJP strategy — pointing out Congress ‘misdeeds’, comparing NDA with UPA
In his speech Monday, the prime minister referred to Nehru’s Independence Day speech, delivered from the Red Fort in 1959.
“Let me read out what Nehru said. He said ‘Indians are not used to working hard, that we generally don’t work as hard as people in Europe, Japan, China, or Russia. (He said) these communities have become prosperous through their hard work and intelligence, so Nehru was giving certificate (sic) to other countries while looking down on Indians”.
He also quoted from Indira Gandhi’s speech from 1974 — a time when her government was facing protests across the country under the JP movement — as the Bihar movement, spearheaded by veteran socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan, eventually came to be known. In her speech, she expressed concern over the “defeatist attitude” plaguing the country.
“Unfortunately, it has become our habit that, when some work finishes, we become complacent. When some difficulty presents itself, we lose hope. Sometimes it feels as if the whole nation has adopted a defeatist attitude, but letting go of hope cannot solve any problems,” Modi quoted Indira as saying.
“Looking at the people in Congress today,” he went on to say tauntingly, “it seems that Indira Gandhi could not assess the people of the country correctly. But her estimation of the Congress is absolutely correct.”
According to a BJP functionary, this was Modi’s way of making the citizens feel “empowered”.
“As the chief minister of Gujarat, he used to say six crore Gujaratis will make way for development to help inspire a sense of belonging and responsibility among people,” the functionary said. “He always believed in people’s strengths. Now he always says that the country will reach new heights with the help of 140 crore countrymen to infuse that sense of belonging. Not only will this help people get behind this government’s every decision and development work but they also know that the prime minister is praising citizens’ contribution.”
The Modi government has already announced “a white paper” on the state of the economy to compare the 10 years of its rule with that of the UPA. In her interim budget speech on 1 February, Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said this will be gone “only for the purpose of drawing lessons from the mismanagement of those years”.
“In 2014, when our Government assumed the reins, the responsibility to mend the economy step by step and to put the governance systems in order was enormous. The need of the hour was to give hope to the people, to attract investments, and to build support for the much-needed reforms. The government did that successfully following our strong belief of ‘nation-first’,” she said, adding that “the crisis of those years has been overcome, and the economy has been put firmly on a high sustainable growth path with all-round development”.
According to a second BJP functionary, bringing a white paper will “expose Congress wrong-doing during their 10 years of rule, how they have mismanaged banks, how every sector crumbled, and how the state of the economy was”.
“People will realise actual development when they compare with the past government and see the difference (for themselves). It (this plan) was put into effect Monday when the prime minister said that the Congress would have taken 40-60 years to achieve the road network that we have developed in the last 10 years,” this functionary said.
According to BJP sources, while speeches of leaders like Modi and Union Home Minister Amit Shah frequently and pointedly target Nehru and Indira Gandhi, the same cannot be said about state units.
“That’s why state units have been asked to prepare a fact sheet of such misdeeds. It could be a speech, correspondence between Nehru and other leaders, or it could be decisions taken by Indira or Rajiv (former prime minister and Indira’s son Rajiv Gandhi) to corner the Congress during elections,” another senior BJP leader said.
One such “misdeed” appears to be the Ram Temple in Ayodhya. Modi, during a speech in Assam’s Guwahati Sunday referred to last month’s Ram Lalla consecration and accused the successive Congress governments of being “ashamed of their own culture” and “not protecting Hindu sites”.
It was also this strategy of showing how Congress’s mistakes impacted Indians in the years following India’s Independence that prompted the prime minister to announce in 2021 that 14 August will be observed as Partition Remembrance Day, a third senior BJP leader told ThePrint.
While making the announcement on 14 August that year, Modi said that the pain of the partition “can never be forgotten and that millions lost their lives due to ‘mindless’ hate and violence”.
“In 2021, when the prime minister announced (the government’s decision) to observe 14 August as Vibhajan Vibhishika Smriti Diwas, or the Partition Remembrance Day, many editorials wondered why there was a need for it, and why we couldn’t instead observe it as a day of reconciliation (of Hindus and Muslims),” this leader, also a former Union minister, said. “But the BJP wants to remember how thousands of people died during the Congress rule.”
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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