Politics, after all, is where strategies make all the difference – more so, in turning adversity to advantage. See how a clever Prime Minister Narendra Modi has turned the tables on the Congress, and with relative ease. The main weapon used by the Congress and its principal campaigner Rahul Gandhi was Rafale, to puncture Modi’s claim of running a clean government after the disastrous scams of the UPA periods. It seemed to take a toll on the PM and the ruling BJP as they fought the Lok Sabha polls inch by inch through the past few weeks. By a sleight of hand, the PM then changed the adverse campaign scenario to his advantage.
Note the fact that today, the talk is no more about Rafale. Rafale is past, and Bofors has come back from relative obscurity to occupy centre-stage in the campaign arena. Aggressor Rahul Gandhi is scurrying around to defend himself. This, after the PM fired a lethal shot from a campaign platform, by invoking the Bofors scam of the 1980s. He went one more step ahead, with some planning, and brought in Rahul’s father Rajiv Gandhi calling him Bhrashtrachari Number One – or, the most corrupt. All hell was let loose, and everyone was scrambling their weapons to attack Modi, not for the Rafale deal, but for bringing in a martyr of such a high stature to gross “disrepute.”
With one stroke, the PM seems to have punctured the Congress offensive. Instead of defending himself in what palpably was an embarrassing situation, the PM dramatically turned around and took on the shape of an aggressor. Long-forgotten memories of Bofors naturally reach up to the interiors of Italy.
The embarrassment for the Congress is all the more because, as the principal opposition headed into the battleground, it talked only about Rafale, and did not bother to highlight the many weak points of Modi’s five-year rule. There was hardly any mention about the disastrous demonetisation, the failure on the part of the government to rev up the industrial and manufacturing sectors in ways as to generate jobs, and the overall downturn in economy. Instead, the Congress put all its eggs into the Rafale basket. Now, midway through the sail, the Congress campaign boat seems to have lost steam.
Modi scored a point, but he and the BJP may still not have the last laugh. One has to wait till May 23 to know how the nation judged the PM’s performance in the past five years. However, one thing that will remain about this election is the low life language used by all political parties which makes the phrase “hitting below the belt” sound blase.
