Congress: Is Modi God’s gift to India or to oligarchs

The Congress on Monday took a dig at Union minister M. Venkaiah Naidu for hailing Prime Minister Narendra Modi as “God’s gift to India”, wondering whether his flattering chant was much different from Dev Kant Baruah’s “India is Indira and Indira is India”, a remark for which he was castigated.

“When Baruah symbolically said Indira was India and India was Indira, he was castigated; is Naidu’s chant abt Modi being god’s gift much diff (sic) ” party spokesman Abhishek Singhvi asked in a series of tweets.

Baruah was president of the Congress during the Emergency in the mid-Seventies and is chiefly remembered for his “sycophancy” to then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

“Jaya’s cabinet prostrates with idolatry & fawning flattery condemned; Wht of whole modi cabinet (eg Naidu & Swaraj) paying verbal obeisance (sic) ” Mr Singhvi said, suggesting that Mr Modi’s Cabinet is no different from that of Tamil Nadu CM Jayalalithaa.

Another party spokesman, Sanjay Jha, was sarcastic and recalled the Gujarat riots of 2002 when Mr Modi was CM. “God’s gift indeed! Go ask the family of Ehsan Jafri and over a thousand mercilessly killed, and their families and children. #Shameless. Dadri and Jharkhand lynching is a sickening manifestation of the decline and fall of India under Narendra Modi. #Shame,” Mr Jha tweeted.

At the AICC briefing, party spokesman Manish Tewari remarked that the jury is still out whether the Prime Minister is God’s gift to India or God’s gift to the oligarchs of India.

The Congress, on its Twitter handle, also took a jibe at Mr Naidu. “Venkaiahji, you too are a gift from God. Every life is a gift from God. Man becomes great by deeds, not rhetoric. For Mother India, every Indian son and daughter is a gift of God. It is unfortunate that the BJP does not believe so,” it said.

Moving a political resolution at the just-concluded BJP national executive here on Sunday, Mr Naidu hailed Mr Modi as “God’s gift to India” and a messiah for the poor.

On the BJP’s “facile and spurious” debate on nationalism, Mr Tewari said that the only reason why the bogey of nationalism is being raised is to cover the inadequacies and the failures of the past 22 months.

“It is ironic as to who is raising the question of nationalism — the political party whose predecessors, whose ideological mentor had no role to play in the Independence of India, whose erstwhile leaders apologised to the British imperialists in order to come out of jail, a party which had no role to play in the national re-construction of India. In fact, even after 1947, there is not a single leader of the RSS, its erstwhile progeny, the Jan Sangh and later the BJP who has even sacrificed for the unity and integrity of this country. In fact, the Congress has a long and illustrious list of names, including two former Prime Ministers, and recently it was Congress leaders who died in Chhattisgarh fighting against Maoists,” he said.

Mr Tweari further said “it is an extremely ironic situation that the pseudo Nationalist have become the contractors of Nationalism in this country.” When Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose said 'Jai Hind’, or for that matter Bhagat Singh, Raj Guru and Sukh Dev said 'Hindustan Zindabad, or even Inqulab Zindabad,’ did that make them less Nationalists, than those who say ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’. Whether it is ‘Bharat Mata Ki Jai’, it is ‘Jai Hind’, it is ‘Mera Bharat Mahan’, Hindustan Zindabad, ‘Vande Matram’, they are all synonyms of the same emotion and so, therefore, to try and divide this country on this litmus test, that those who say ‘Bharat Mata ki Jai’ are Nationals, and those use the synonym are anti-National, are for the better word reducing Nationalism to a very reductionist binary - something which is dangerous for this country,he said.