By Aravind Bhatikar
THE proposed mega-meeting of the top bosses of all opposition parties excepting Naveen Patnaik of Odisha, Jagan Reddy of Andra and Chandrashekar Rao of Telangana, on June 23 at Patna, has set off loud alarm bells in Delhi. It is a foregone conclusion that the Modi-Shah duo’s dictatorship will be a part of our history, if top bosses of all major opposition parties put up one common prime ministerial candidate to fight the duo. Opposition parties had bagged almost 63% of the votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.
The Modi duo seem to have begun implementing a two-fold strategy to perpetuate their hegemony beyond 2024: The Dirty Tricks Department of the BJP has already begun its campaign to malign Rahul Gandhi. For many years in the past, they tried to project Rahul Gandhi as an immature “pappu,” but the Indian voter saw through the mischief and inflicted several humiliating defeats on the Modi-Shah duo in the recent past. The story is too well known to merit repetition.
TWO VIDEOS
THERE are now two new videos that can be seen on the YouTube: The first one alleges that Rahul Gandhi had a secret meeting with top officials of the White House in Washington and those officials included Donald Lu, whom former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan had reportedly held responsible for his ouster from prime minister’s office. This video perhaps intends to project Rahul Gandhi as an anti-national Indian taking the help of foreign governments to dislodge the patriotic Modi. The second video shows Rahul Gandhi as a female, breast-feeding Pakistan which is represented by a suckling child standing on a tall stool.
The second part of the strategy is to sabotage opposition attempts to come together. This is sought to be done through the misuse of existing Indian laws and the abuse of central agencies. It is widely rumoured that Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee and Lalu Prasad’s son Tejashwi Yadav, Bihar’s deputy chief minister, are the next on the central agencies’ hit-list, to be arrested and jailed most probably before the mega-meeting of opposition leaders on June 23.The Chanakyas of the ruling party are reportedly getting convinced that advancing of Lok Sabha elections by four or five months may block opposition efforts to come together and by implication be beneficial to BJP.
NO SCRUPLES
THE strategy of cutting short the time available for opposition unity and utilizing the central agencies more aggressively without any scruples are viewed as the only straws that the Modi-Shah duo can catch for saving themselves from drowning. The government’s heavy dependence on the central agencies to achieve their political goal may misfire if these agencies decide to sail with the wind that is blowing against the Modi-Shah duo; moreover, increased aggression by the CBI, ED and IT departments may be counterproductive if the police and civil bureaucracy under State government use their powers to hit back at the Centre. If that happens, the Indian voter may say to the Modi-Shah duo, “enough is enough, now stay at home and take rest. Let Rahul Gandhi run our federal structure!”