Having miserably failed in their many attempts to check the rise of the Gujarat Chief Minister to the national stage, the anti-Modi brigade has resorted to cheap snides on his personal life
There is a time and place for everything. As Union Minister for Finance in the Rajiv Gandhi Government, VP Singh’s tax police conducted raids on several high-profile industrialists and even hauled up a titan of industry to the police station for questioning. There was a huge furore but by and large the people saw VP Singh as a ‘courageous’ Minister who had acted against the ‘privileged’. His image of a man of integrity helped, though he lost the Finance portfolio and got Defence, where he proceeded to unearth the Bofors and the HDW submarine scams.
Imagine if today, under the tainted and corrupt-ridden Government, the authorities had to summon a prominent industrialist to the police station and question him on his company’s financial dealing. Not only would the moral right of the regime be questioned but also the timing — when the economy has tanked and investments are fleeing the country. It would be plain stupid to do a VP Singh now.
Similarly, Congressmen must understand that the time for demonising Narendra Modi over the 2002 violence has long passed. The Congress had its chance in the immediate aftermath of the event, but it failed to capitalise on it. Mr Modi won the Gujarat 2002 Assembly election for the Bharatiya Janata Party, post the violence, by a handsome margin. Between then and now, the Congress has tried to resurrect the horrors of the past but failed repeatedly. like many other events, the 2002 is past its shelf life. The tragic incident still rattles but the people have moved on — so has politics. The only ones still stuck in a time warp are the Congress and the hate-Modi brigade. If only the Congress had shown a similar resolve in governing the country, we would have been saved many of the miseries that torment us.
It started with a hobby — a few Congress leaders from Gujarat and in the central leadership spent their spare time in Modi-bashing. Over time and as Mr Modi grew in stature into a pan-India figure, the hobby turned into a profession for many. The saturation point had to come soon, and it has.
After years of vitriolic onslaught, the anti-Modi forces have run out of scoring points, and their plight has been made worse with the failure of the Congress to project a leader of substance against the Gujarat Chief Minister and now the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial nominee. Mr Rahul Gandhi is a non-starter at worst and at best an untested leader.
Mr P Chidambaram, another hopeful, has too much egg on his face over a failed economy and alleged complicity in the 2G Spectrum scam, to be a credible alternative to Mr Modi. But you must hand it to the Congress: It doesn’t give up even if it has to continuously spin one fragile yarn after another to keep its venomous campaign alive.
Given that various opinion surveys have consistently hammered the message that Mr Modi is the country’s foremost choice for prime ministership, with Mr Gandhi lagging a distant second, the Congress’s desperation is understandable. What matches that desperation is the ingenuity of anti-Modi and pro-Congress elements in the media who are scrambling to downplay the surge in support for the Gujarat Chief Minister across the country. In a recent debate on a television channel, a participant devised a new parameter to compare Mr Modi with the Congress’s unofficial prime ministerial candidate, Mr Gandhi. The problem, according to the erudite commentator, is that the people know “very little” about Mr Modi.
Now that’s a wonder. One would have thought that after disseminating the tiniest bit of information that exists on the Gujarat Chief Minister and dissecting every section of his public life, there’s little left to be known.
But the commentator posed a teaser: What do the people know about Mr Modi’s ‘personal life’, his relationships etcIJ How on earth is that relevantIJ It is, the commentator emphasised. People will find it difficult to relate to a leader who is aloof, whose personal life — marriage etc — is under wraps. Contrarily, the commentator added, Mr Gandhi’s life is an open book (reallyIJ). We know about his father, grandmother and great grandfather, he said approvingly.
So, it boils down to family lineage. A man who hawked tea at a railway station, broomed the rooms of the RSS office and rose from the lowest rungs to being the prime ministerial candidate of the country’s largest opposition party without a helpful shove from members of a political dynasty, cannot be trusted because we don’t know anything about his relatives! He does not have an illustrious family tree to boast of.
It never occurred to this otherwise well-intentioned commentator that, regardless of Mr Modi’s enigmatic persona and the ‘lack of information about his personal life’, the people of Gujarat have swept him and the party he leads in the State to power for three consecutive terms. They have had no issues with his personal life. Millions of people in the country have no problem in seeing him as a deserving prime ministerial candidate, and they couldn’t be less bothered by the so-called lack of information on his personal life. In any case, what has he got to hideIJ Does he have a criminal background — which quite a few of the Congress members sitting in Assemblies and Parliament doIJ
Ironically, many of his critics, who are eager to dig out material on Mr Modi’s personal life, have been advocating a shift from ‘personality’ to ‘issue-based’ politics. How does the endeavour to personalise Mr Modi’s candidature square up with such stated intentIJ The BJP’s prime ministerial candidate has been speaking of issues; his detractors like the commentator quoted earlier, want to discuss personal affairs. In any case, there is enough material in the public domain about Mr Modi’s personal life; books on him do refer to it. If Mr Modi does not wish to discuss them, he has the right to privacy.
But the rot has gone deep in the Congress. Affected by Modi- phobia, every party leader of some consequence is equipped with a Modi DIY (for dumbsters, it stands for Do It Yourself) kit. The various implements in the kit are designed to create the most grotesque configurations of the Gujarat Chief Minister. Some Congress leaders through constant practice have become remarkably skilled at the act. Others are busy writing and reading ‘Modi for Dummies’ — yet another inventive pursuit to de-humanise the Chief Minister. While the masters of imaginative nonsense are busy playing games, Mr Modi is marching ahead.
(The accompanying visual is of BJP supporters wearing Narendra Modi masks at a rally in Rewari, Haryana. PTI Photo by Shahbaz Khan)