Modi in maldieves

Courtesy ‘’ thae wire https://thewire.in/222409/modi-congress-desperation/

When a government feels it is doing well, it invariably emphasises its

achievements. Former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s ‘India
Shining’ campaign is a good example. It is only when it does not, that it starts
harping on the real or imagined failures of its predecessors. Narendra Modi
has been doing this ever since he sensed that his party was headed towards a
possible defeat in Gujarat (it scraped to victory with 99 seats, well short of the
150-plus seats it aimed to win). He has redoubled his efforts since the BJP’s
shattering loss of all three by-elections in Rajasthan to the Congress.

In Gujarat, polls taken by his own party before the second round of voting had
shown that the party was in imminent danger of losing its majority. Modi’s
reaction was to go on a blistering personalised attack on the Gandhi family at
the opening of the Ambedkar International Centre in Delhi. When Mani
Shankar Aiyar instinctively responded with a measured, but equally personal
counterattack on Modi – and instead of defending him, Rahul Gandhi chose
to throw him to the wolves – Modi found the bone he had been looking for to
chew.

Over the next three days, he made Mani Shankar the surrogate for the
Congress party, and made a succession of the wildest, most brazenly false,
accusations against him – of going to Pakistan to hatch a conspiracy to kill
Modi, and of hosting a secret meeting at his own home to plan how to make a
Muslim plant of Pakistan’s ISI the Congress’ next chief minister in Gujarat.
Rahul and the rest of the Congress could only bite their fingernails and watch
as Modi savaged Mani Shankar (and by association the Congress) to shreds.

This tactic helped Modi scrape through in Gujarat, even if by far lower
margins than expected. So it is hardly surprising that he resorted to it again in
his reply to the opposition during the motion of thanks in parliament on the
President’s address to the nation. In his 70-minute reply, according to reports,
Modi ‘tore into’ and launched a ‘blistering attack’ on the Congress, and
blamed it for all the ills that the country was suffering from today.