Senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh on Sunday said that while the BJP was seeking votes in the Karnataka Assembly polls in the name of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the Congress had adopted the PM’s “vocal for local” slogan and was raising issues of the people of the state.
In an interview with PTI, Ramesh said Karnataka, after four years of the BJP rule, needs ‘Vitamin-P’ in which the P stands for “performance” of the Congress and not “polarisation” of the BJP.
Using armed forces’ terminology, Ramesh said the Congress is not worried about the “carpet bombing” campaign strategy of Prime Minister Modi and other senior BJP leaders as it has enough “anti-aircraft guns” to deal with it.
The more the carpet bombing campaign the BJP indulges in, the more clearly it indicates its “despair and desperation”, the Congress general secretary in-charge communications said.
Ramesh, who is a star campaigner for the party, said the Karnataka polls were about the BJP’s “threats” versus Congress’ governance guarantees.
He claimed that the Congress would get a “clear majority” that would render “Operation Lotus” totally unnecessary.
Operation Lotus is the term used by opposition parties to describe what they call “poaching” of MLAs by the BJP to topple state governments.
Asked about reports of former chief minister Siddaramaiah and Karnataka Congress president D K Shivakumar looking to outdo each other for the post of CM, Ramesh said, “This time around, the dissidence in the Congress is at a minimum. There are only a few rebel independent candidates and many of them are withdrawing.”
“In any case, the dissidence in the Congress is nothing as compared with the dissidence in the BJP which has lost its former chief minister, deputy CM, members of the national executive and many other national, state and local level leaders,” Ramesh said.
He said five top Congress leaders - party chief Mallikarjun Kharge, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Siddaramaiah and Shivakumar - would probably cover the 224 constituencies among them during the campaign.
“So, I think we are presenting a united front and this I think is the impact of the Bharat Jodo Yatra. Some people criticize the Bharat Jodo Yatra that it would not pay electoral dividends but I think the yatra is giving electoral dividends as it gave a sense of solidarity and a sense of purpose to the Congress,” he told PTI over the phone from Karnataka where he is on the campaign trail.
Today the story of Karnataka politics is the “dissidence and disunity” in the BJP, not in the Congress, he stressed.
“Right now everybody is focused on getting the Congress back to power. We are nor focussing on individuals. This is not a beauty contest for individuals, this is a choice between political parties, a choice between competing ideologies, a choice between competing visions for Karnataka’s future,” Ramesh said.