A few days after AAP co-founder Mayank Gandhi’s stinging criticism of Arvind Kejriwal’s credentials, party’s chief spokesperson for Goa Dr Oscar Rebello, has now claimed that one of AAP’s biggest mistakes and a key reason for its electoral failures was its ‘obsession’ with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Rebello, a respected city doctor, in an article published on a popular local news website, has also slammed the party’s earlier decision to sack social workers and founder members of the Aam Aadmi Party, Yogendra Yadav and Prashant Bhushan from the party, which he says could have alienated AAP from a significant section of the intelligentsia.
In the article ‘Oh Arvind, My Arvind’, Rebello, who is the party’s chief spokesperson for Goa and its most popular leader, however says that it not correct to write of Kejriwal, who he has compared to the angry-young Amitabh Bachc-
han, who in the iconic movies of the bygone era, fought corruption alone.
“Crushing black economy is the life blood of AAP and demonetisation should have been welcomed, with caveats of course, but our blind rage of Modi-Shah blinded us to the obvious,” Rebello said in his article. “There can be no doubt that the Modi-Shah combination is cleverly eviscerating democracy, one institutional and media pillar at a time, but in public perception we fell into two of their well-laid-out traps. One, condemning the surgical strike, while doubting the Army version and secondly doing a ballistic on demonetisation,” Rebello said.
Dubbing AAP’s anti-corruption stance as a one-trick pony, Rebello said that the combination of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the party’s national president Amit Shah had the attention of the Hindu voter, at least for now.
Referring to the sacking
of Bhushan and Yadav, Rebello said that the crude action
was not in the best interests
of the AAP.