Congress campaign exemplifies how not to do it: Jaitley

BJP leader Arun Jaitley Tuesday said the Congress campaign in the lok Sabha election is an example of how "not to organise it".

"As the polls enter the last two phases, the Congress party's campaign was a textbook lesson of how not to organise it," Jaitley said in a blog Tuesday.

Jaitley said the Congress focused on points such as the Centre giving grants to the states, Right to Information, food and land bills as the key campaign issues but completely ignored the popular view.

"Even though Narendra Modi captured the popular imagination, the Congress thought if (P.) Chidambaram, (Kapil) Sibal, (Manish) Tewari, Jairam (Ramesh), Anand Sharma and Beni Prasad were exceptionally rude and discourteous, they would demolish what they thought was the Modi myth... They ended up demolishing themselves," he said.

Jaitley took a jibe at Congress leaders, saying: "The Jairams and the Sibals have been God's special gift to the Congress. They then decided to manufacture a new campaign. They clapped like a child thinking that the 'Toffee Campaign' was working even though it was based on falsehood."

The BJP leader said when nothing succeeded, the Snoopgate (opposition parties allege the Modi government ordered tracking of the movements of a young woman and spied on her in Gujarat in late 2009) was given a rebirth, hoping it would succeed.

"But when things go wrong, they could go horribly wrong. Thus it didn't succeed. These are the pitfalls of contesting elections without an issue and then manufacturing a campaign based on non-issues. The Congress ended up buying its own propaganda," he said.