Modi’s boast crosses all limits
For Prime Minister Narendra Modi all adversaries are enemies and all enemies are Pakistanis and all Pakistanis are terrorists whom he threatens to air strike or surgical strike. Otherwise, there is no sense in using the words such as air strikes and surgical strikes in an election meeting at Patancheru near Hyderabad on Tuesday. Telangana is not Pakistan. It does not harbour terrorists. Then what does Modi mean by saying that his government can take up both surgical strikes and air strikes? Boasting about post-Pulwama strikes in Pakistan territory? Trying to create the atmosphere that prevailed before 2019 elections?
The over confidence built over the selfmade narrative of four hundred seats that the NDA is supposed to win in cominig elections appears to have gone to his head. He has been repeating 400 in each and every political meeting. There are apprehensions about his claim of those many seats which no other objective political observer is prepared to give.
The BJP has 290 seats out of 545 in the 17th Lok Sabha. If it has to win 370 seats as being projected by Modi, it has to win 67 seats more than the 303 it won in 2019. It appears impossible. In Maharashtra, Bihar and Karnataka where the BJP won handsomely in 2019, the party is facing tough times. One can safely predict that the party is not going to win as many seats in these states as it won in the last elections inspite of volteface by Nitish Kumar in Bihar or splitting of Shiv Sena and NCP in Maharashtra or tie-up with the JD(S) in Karnataka. And there are no states either in the South, East or North-East where it can hope to break fresh ground and improve it position. This estimate would be true if the elections are held in a free and fair manner. The fact that the PM has been consistently saying that his party would win not less than 370 and NDA would get more than 400 makes the opposition parties and non-partisan political observers doubt if the elections are going to be free and fair.
With the Election Commission being what it is, cental agencies in tight control of the government and the judiciary being unpredictable, it is not difficult to rig the elections. For those who indulge in massive defections and change of governments, manipulations in elections would not be a taboo. Those who talk of reclaiming the Republic and saving democracy do not seem to be aware of this impending danger. Not that they will be able to do anything about it.
Modi calls Congress and other opposition parties corrupt and declares his government as clean. Those corrupt politicians who were forced to defect to the BJP become pure thanks to the BJP’s washing machine. For instance, Ashok Chavan, former chief minister of Maharashtra who was called corrupt by Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah in election after election, gets nominated to Rajya Sabha almost the same day he defected from the Congress to the BJP. The issue of Caravan, one before the magazine was banned, contains stories which say the corruption in Modi government is astronomical. SBI, which won several awards for being the fastest bank with computerisation as its strong point, says it needs 130 days to submit a statement to Supreme Court on Electoral Bonds. So much for Modi’s anti-corruption tirade and tansparancy claim!
Modi accused in Patancheru meeting that the opposition parties had hidden their black money is foreign banks . The same old charge repeated hundred times. He failed to fulfill his promise, made ten years ago in the 2014 election campaign, to bring back the black money and deposit Rs 15 lakh in every citizen’s account. He has been talking about the corruption by opposition leaders without substantiating anything and welcoming the leaders facing corruption charges into his own party after using central agencies like CBI, ED and IT to coerce them. People are watching the preachings and practices by the prime minister. They are clever enough to see through the game of one-upmanship and false claims. Getting a third term in these conditions is difficult if not impossible. At least, 370 seats for the BJP is a tall order.
