For the moment what is more important is that for the first time since this election campaign began the Prime Minister appears to be on the backfoot. (IE)
Why the Prime Minister said what he did last week is a mystery. What is clear is that by openly charging India’s two richest men with sending “tempos filled with black money in sacks” to the Congress Party he has put himself in a bind. For those of you who may have missed the speech, what he said was that the “Congress Party’s Shehzada” had spent five years repeating the mantra “Ambani-Adani, Ambani-Adani” but stopped once the election campaign began. Why? He challenged Rahul Gandhi to declare how much he got from Messrs Ambani and Adani.
The response came immediately. Rahul Gandhi uploaded a video saying that if the Prime Minister knew Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani were sending him bags full of cash, why had he not sent the ED and CBI to investigate? Valid question. Meanwhile, the Congress president put a mocking tweet on X about friends no longer being friends and how this was a sign of how the times were changing. The Congress Party’s campaign committee quickly calculated that Rahul had used Adani’s name 103 times after the campaign began, proving that the Prime Minister got basic facts wrong.
Nobody is better at changing bad narratives into good ones than the BJP’s media managers. But their services were not needed this time. The Congress Party itself did the job. Those two crotchety old men who have acted as wrecking balls in the last two Lok Sabha elections came forward to distract people’s attention from what the Prime Minister so recklessly said. First came Sam Pitroda with his offensive, racist and ludicrous remark about the skin colour of Indians. This time he got the sack from his job as head of the Overseas wing of the Congress Party but no sooner had damage control been done than along came Mani Shankar Aiyar to cause more damage.
An interview he gave last month suddenly appeared on every news channel in which he is heard saying that a “muscular” approach to Pakistan could not work because it had its own nuclear “muscles in Kahuta”. His intention was to make the point that in the past ten years the good work that the Congress Party had done to keep Pakistan pacified had been undone by Modi’s hostile, acrimonious approach to the Islamist Republic next door. What Aiyar achieved with his interview was to harm the Congress Party instead of harming Modi. Congress spokesmen immediately distanced the party from Aiyar’s views.
The Prime Minister’s rash and puzzling speech has disappeared from headlines but has not been forgotten. Modi is such a skilled politician that he has almost never made the mistake of saying something that he might live to regret. So, what happened this time? What made him attack the two men who everyone believes count among his closest friends? And what action does he plan to take against them now that he has charged them with sending sacks filled with ‘black money’ to the Congress Party’s royal family?
The damage he has done himself is serious because it shows that he failed in his mission to end black money. He was obsessed with doing this from the time he first took office. It was almost the first item on his agenda. On state visits abroad he asked world leaders for help and when he cancelled 85% of our currency overnight in 2016, it was with the stated aim of ending black money. Instead, what demonetisation achieved was to cause serious harm to the economy and the destruction of small businesses. Black money has continued to thrive. When Modi lists his achievements, he never mentions demonetisation. Will he now similarly forget the very serious charges he has leveled against Messrs Ambani and Adani?
For the moment what is more important is that for the first time since this election campaign began the Prime Minister appears to be on the backfoot. None of the issues that he has raised in recent weeks have resonated with voters. This is because none of these issues were issues at all. When he declared that if the Congress Party came to power, it would steal women’s ‘mangalsutras’, it made him look vulnerable and slightly hysterical. He would have to be feeling very vulnerable to make so absurd a charge.
Then off he went to Ayodhya to pray once more at the Ram Temple and that seemed to have no resonance with voters either. His loyal adjutant, Amit Shah, stepped in to declare in feverish tones at a public meeting that “Rahul baba” should know that not even if his Nani came back into this world would she be able to stop the CAA. Did he forget that he was talking about Rahul’s Dadi and not his Nani? And does he really think that the amendment to the citizenship law is something that voters across India care about?
Having mulled over the mistakes that the BJP’s two biggest leaders have recently made, I have concluded that this happened because the campaign has dragged on much too long. If there is one thing that we can learn from this endless summer election it is that the Election Commission must find a way of completing the election process in a shorter period. When an election campaign lasts six weeks, everyone starts running out of steam. A torpor has begun to settle and a deep ennui. Everyone is getting bored.
