By Sushil Kutty
As Prime Minister Narendra Modi dreams of “400 paar”, the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party have made their final pitches, hoping to strike pay-dirt, i.e., Prime Minister Narendra Modi will meet his Waterloo come June 4, 2024. Congress released its bombshell manifesto and AAP trained guns on the BJP, claiming that the BJP and not AAP was behind the ‘Dilli Sharab Ghotala’.
Strangely, with that the AAP acknowledged that the Delhi Liquor Policy Scam wasn’t somebody’s figment of intoxicated imagination. The majority of Delhi’s citizenry has now got an answer, but the culprit is the BJP, not the AAP. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal should be released from Tihar. Why isn’t AAP approaching the Supreme Court to get “acting Chief Minister” Sunitha Kejriwal’s “Bhagat Singh” released from jail?
AAP Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Singh is the main “sutradaar” of “BJP is behind the Dilli Sharab Ghotala” claim. Singh was released from jail on bail a few days ago, with conditions attached, including that he will refrain from talking about the Delhi excise policy scam while out on bail. Singh signed on the dotted line, but is talking “Dilli sharab ghotala” all the time, and placing the blame squarely on the BJP.
Singh claims his release from jail as a victory for AAP, and proof that Manish Sisodia, Satyender Jain, and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, are all innocent, and that the Enforcement Directorate had caught the wrong guys. Sanjay Singh is pledge-bound to not flout the bail conditions, but nobody seems to care, not even the Enforcement Directorate.
On Friday, Sanjay Singh claimed that the BJP’s top leadership was behind the “conspiracy to arrest” Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and that the BJP was responsible for the “Dilli Sharab Ghotala”. Speaking of the “big conspiracy” to put Arvind Kejriwal in jail, Singh said senior BJP leaders planned the liquor policy scam and carried it out, from start to finish. Sanjay Singh fully expects the majority of the Delhi electorate to believe his story and vote for the Aam Aadmi Party.
Singh spun this hardly believable yarn at an AAP press conference in Delhi. Shockingly, the media did not question Singh’s “theory”. Sanjay Singh appears to be heading the party of “anarchists” for the time being, ever since his release from jail, and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s incarceration. Ministers Atishi Marlena and Saurav Bharadwaj are suddenly more second-rung than they were when Arvind Kejriwal was CM operating from outside Tihar. With the BJP unable to defend itself from AAP attacks, Sanjay Singh is leading the AAP “fight-back”.
Sanjay Singh did not linger at the Tihar gates. He strode out, all guns blazing and the Bharatiya Janata Party is since then trading fire with the Aam Aadmi Party as if Arvind Kejriwal is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘Adversary No.1’. Going by television debates over the past fortnight, this is the conclusion staring everybody in the face.
Chances are the AAP will be going into the 2024 general elections pitching Arvind Kejriwal against Prime Minister Narendra Modi one-on-one. That, or maybe, AAP is in panic and is blabbering gibberish as Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s comeuppance could be coming any day. A stroll through Delhi in any direction shows that the AAP is no longer the No.1 choice of the majority of Delhi’s electorate.
It is hard to believe that the AAP-Congress alliance will sweep Delhi’s seven parliamentary seats. But the Congress is not so much thinking of AAP’s problems and solutions than of its strategy to dethrone Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The grand old party, led by the Nehru-Gandhi Family, on Friday released its multipronged manifesto for Lok Sabha elections 2024. Party President Mallikarjun Kharge did the honours along with former party presidents, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi.
It is the Congress’s final pitch to make the cut to take on the BJP. The manifesto calls itself ‘Nyay Patra’ and its five commitments, ‘Yuva Nyay’, ‘Naari Nyay’, ‘Kisaan Nyay’, ‘Shramik Nyay’, and ‘Hissedari Nyay’. Everything that Rahul Gandhi does has ‘Nyay’ at its roots. ‘Nyay’ was at the centre of his second Bharat jodoyatra, the Bharat Jodo ‘Nyay’ Yatra. The Congress party’s electoral guarantees can be kept only by Rahul Gandhi.
As it is, the party has cut the manifesto release date a little too fine. April 19 will be the first phase of the elections and getting the manifesto offerings through to the electorate is the big challenge. Journalist Arnab Goswami, speaking for the Modi government and the BJP, rubbished “the Vadra Congress’s manifesto”, but the fact remains, if elected to power, the Congress will undertake a nationwide Caste Census, dismantle the Agniveer scheme, and ride roughshod over the 50 percent cap on reservations for SC, ST, and the OBC.
There is other stuff in the Congress manifesto including a set of very alluring poll promises made solely to serve the interests of India’s second largest majority, the Muslims. Not surprisingly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the Congress manifesto reminded him of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s ‘Qaid-e-Azam’. The fact remains that the BJP faces a determined Opposition and cannot be altogether sure about Modi’s “abki baar 400 paar”. (IPA Service)
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