The BJP brass led by home minister Amit Shah and defence minister Rajnath Singh went all out on Wednesday to portray leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi as “anti-national” and “anti-reservation”, twisting some of the comments he made during his three-day trip to the US.

Shah and Singh joined the wider ecosystem that has been hitting out at Rahul for the past few days, indicating a planned effort to take on the Congress leader on his first US visit in his new role as leader of the Opposition.

“Standing with forces that conspire to divide the country and making anti-national statements have become a habit for Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party,” Shah said, in a long post in Hindi and English on X.

“Whether it is supporting the JKNC’s anti-national and anti-reservation agenda in J&K or making anti-India statements on foreign platforms, Rahul Gandhi has always threatened the nation’s security and hurt sentiments,” Shah added.

Defence minister Singh, who sparingly engages in such drives, also came out with a long post on X, indicating a strategy being pushed from the top to go all guns blazing against Rahul, whose political maturity appears to have unsettled the ruling dispensation. “The kind of misleading and baseless things that the leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Shri Rahul Gandhi, is saying during his foreign tour is extremely shameful and hurts the dignity of India,” Singh said.

“Similarly, the kind of claims he has made on the soil of America regarding the India-China border dispute are also misleading and beyond facts. It seems that while running the shop of love (mohabbat ki dukan), Rahul has ended up opening a shop of lies,” he added.

The attack by the two ministers focused on the beaten track of accusing Rahul of making anti-national statements and denigrating the country’s image on foreign soil without going into specifics. Shah, however, went a step further and accused Rahul of being “anti-reservation”, appearing to be deliberately twisting the leader of Opposition’s remarks on quota.

“By speaking about abolishing reservation in the country, Rahul Gandhi once again brought the Congress’s anti-reservation face to the forefront. The thoughts in his mind eventually found their way out as words,” Shah said. He went on to hold up the BJP as the protector of the country and reservations.

“I want to tell Rahul Gandhi that as long as the BJP is there, neither can anyone abolish reservations nor can anyone mess with the nation’s security,” he added.

Rahul, who has been vociferously demanding a caste census and pressing for increasing the reservation limit, had advocated the opposite of what Shah and other BJP leaders accused him of.

During an interactive session at Georgetown University in Washington DC, when Rahul was asked about abolishing reservations, he said: “We should think of scrapping reservations only when India becomes a fair place. And India is not a fair place right now.”

The BJP is believed to have suffered setbacks in the general election because of the Opposition campaign accusing the party of plotting to change the Constitution and end reservations. This was seen to be the reason behind the apparent desperation to paint Rahul as anti-reservation.

Commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal also slammed Rahul for meeting US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, calling her an “anti-India propagandist”.

“I condemn the statements and the people who he (Rahul) is meeting on his foreign trip. On one hand, he is meeting Miss Omar who is a known anti-India propagandist. She is known to be pro-Pakistan…. Such anti-India forces who are aligned with the Muslim brotherhood, the ISI have become friends of the Congress party and Shri Rahul Gandhi,” Goyal said.