Division is in BJP, not in our alliance, says Rahul
BATTLEGROUND 2019 ‘PM unpopular within own party; Priyanka to get national role’
NEW DELHI: Congress president Rahul Gandhi has dismissed description of the mahagathbandhan (or grand alliance) versus the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) as chaos versus (Narendra) Modi and said that while opposition parties are united, it is the BJP which is in chaos with senior party leaders not on the same page as the Prime Minister.
In an interview, Gandhi said his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, recently named the party incharge for Uttar Pradesh (east), would play a role nationally as well. “As general secretary, she has, by definition, a national role… I give a job, and then I give another job based on the success of the job,” Gandhi said.
As Congress president, Gandhi said he was keen on strengthening the party and indicated that would drive his approach towards alliances. In Uttar Pradesh, for instance, where the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) have left the Congress out of their grouping to take on the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, he said that while the Congress would “work with the SP and the BSP because we have ideological agreement on a number of issues with them… we are not going to give up our right to push our ideology in Uttar Pradesh either”.
The demand for a Ram temple is a hot button issue in Uttar Pradesh but Gandhi declined to com-
You are not going to get jobs from 15-20 biggest industrialists... You will generate jobs from unleashing potential of small & medium businesses The BJP fundamentally believes in hierarchy. For them, Mr Modi is the centre of all knowledge. It begins and ends there We have been in govt, we have been in Opposition and we believe that you simply do not touch institutions or attack India’s federal structure
mit himself one way or the other. “It would not be fair for me to opine as the highest court in the country is deliberating on it,” he said. “I would say that what the Supreme Court decides is what the Congress and everyone will accept.”
Gandhi targeted Modi in the interview, and said in his “15 years of political career”, he has not seen “the type of Opposition unity” that exists today. “If I [were to] speak to Mr [Nitin] Gad- kari, Ms [Sushma] Swaraj, Rajnath Singh, their [the BJP’S] entire leadership, I wouldn’t be surprised to find absolute rejection of Mr Narendra Modi’s style of functioning. So, the division is actually in the BJP and what is keeping that division publicly out of sight is fear… So, what Mr Modi has not understood is that Mr Modi is only Mr Modi’s leader.”
Gandhi elaborated that the opposition parties were absolutely united on three things. One, the need to address the job crisis; two, the challenges posed by agrarian distress; and three, that “we are not going to let Mr Modi and the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] destroy India’s institutions”. Every institution in India, Gandhi added, “is facing Mr Modi’s autocratic backlash. Mr Modi believes that he is the Lord of India, just like the British believed.”