Rahul Gandhi on Thursday returned to a decades-old slogan in his harshest attack yet on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, insinuating he was a “thief” and possibly setting the tone for the political discourse over the coming months as elections draw near.
“Gali-gali mein shor hai/chowkidar chor hai (There is a buzz on the streets that the custodian is a thief),” the Congress chief told a rally in Sagwara in poll-bound Rajasthan.
Modi, in his election campaign in 2014, had said he wanted to be the country’s chowkidar, not the Prime Minister.
At a public meeting in Jaipur last month, Rahul had directly accused Modi of corruption, saying the Prime Minister — and not the defence minister — had changed the Rafale deal. Earlier too he had criticised Modi as an instrument of corruption.
But Thursday was the first time that Rahul had virtually called Modi a “thief”.
“If a police constable lets the thief run away, you put him in jail. But when Vijay Mallya meets the finance minister after stealing Rs 9,000 crore and tells him that he is going to London, nothing happens to the finance minister. The chowkidar is not asking the finance minister why he allowed the thief to escape. That’s why, ‘gali-gali mein shor hai, chowkidar chor hai’,” Rahul said, repeating the slogan.
The slogan has reverberated on the streets of India multiple times in the past. The Jana Sangh had used it for Indira Gandhi when she was the Prime Minister while the BJP and other parties had reprised it for Rajiv Gandhi when he headed the government.
But party workers, not the top leaders, had primarily used the slogan till Thursday. Now the Congress president has used it himself, setting the agenda for party cadres in the upcoming Assembly elections this year and the general election, due in 2019.
Rajasthan is one of three BJP-ruled states that vote this winter, the others being Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.
Personal attacks are not new in Indian politics. While top Opposition leaders used the nastiest adjectives for Indira Gandhi, V.P. Singh, who became Prime Minister, directly accused Rajiv Gandhi of taking money in the Bofors case. He often showed an audiotape at rallies as evidence, which turned out to be hollow posturing.
Modi himself has targeted Sonia Gandhi, Rahul and the Congress many times. While he has used expressions like “khooni panja” for the Congress’s symbol, he has questioned the morality of “Ma-Beta” (Sonia and Rahul) who are out on bail in the National Herald case. He hasn’t spared even Manmohan Singh, whose personal integrity is considered beyond reproach, saying in Parliament that nobody knew the art of bathing with a raincoat on better than his predecessor. At Thursday’s rally, Rahul targeted Rajasthan chief minister Vasundhara Raje too for alleged financial links with the fugitive Lalit Modi but swiftly moved to the Prime Minister and finance minister Arun Jaitley.
Speaking on the Rafale controversy, he said the “chowkidar can’t explain why the public sector Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd was replaced by Anil Ambani’s firm (for the Rafale offset contract) and why an aircraft worth Rs 526 crore was bought at Rs 1,600 crore”.
The Congress says the then UPA government had fixed a price of Rs 526 crore per Rafale aircraft, which was three times less than the Rs 1,600 crore the Modi government has fixed.
“He did demonetisation and turned all black money into white,” Rahul added.
Arun Jaitley The Telegraph
