The Congress' performance in the Lok Sabha elections showed that it may be down but not out, and Modi is determined to ensure that in the next round in 2029, it is consigned to irrelevance, points out Saisuresh Sivaswamy.
That Prime Minister Narendra Modi reserves his severest of verbal attacks for the Congress, in particular for Rahul Gandhi is well known.
That this attack predates his prime ministership is also a fact.
What is puzzling, however, is why he continues to single out the Congress even when the party has been repeatedly delivered an electoral KO.
In his continuing diatribe at the Congress through the run-up to the Bihar elections and the counting of votes, two instances stand out because the occasion didn't merit such a message.
One, of course, was last Friday, when the counting of votes in Bihar showed the National Democratic Alliance in an unassailable position and the Mahagathbandhan in tatters, especially the Congress which had plumbed a new electoral low in the state.
That evening at the BJP headquarters in New Delhi was meant to be one of celebration, the symbolic raising a toast to the NDA that had roared to power in Patna.
What will the prime minister say was a question that hung heavily in the air.
Would he announce that incumbent chief minister Nitish Kumar will return to office?
Or would he, as part of a deal struck earlier, announce that the Bharatiya Janata Party was rightfully claiming the state's top job, after propping up Nitish Kumar as chief minister for the last five years?
While these questions remained, his castigation of the Congress leadership on the occasion took his customary attack on the party to a whole new level.
'Today, the Congress has become the Muslim League-Maoist Congress, that is, MMC. The kind of negative politics that the party's leaders are engaged in has created the possibility of another major division in the Congress!'
That the Congress was under the thrall of 'urban Maoists' was an earlier refrain from Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, and the Muslim League allusion had been made by another blue-eyed boy in the BJP, Assam Chief Minister Hemanta Biswa Sarma.
It was up to to the prime minister to bring the two accusations together to tar the Congress.
In the aftermath of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections in which the Congress faced its worst drubbing ever, Sonia Gandhi was asked the reasons for the party's poor showing.
She was candid enough to admit that the party had come to be identified as a pro-Muslim party, meaning that Hindu voters had turned away from it.
Modi's 'Muslim-League-Maoist' allusion thus brings together the two worst possible political epithets in contemporary India to damn the Congress till eternity.
After the victory speech at the BJP headquarters on Friday, Modi's second attack in three days on the Congress came at the Indian Express newspaper's Ramnath Goenka Lecture in New Delhi on Monday.
The occasion: A celebration of the doyen of Indian publishing who gave a new dimension to journalism.
That Goenka's publication has always been considered an anti-Establishment newspaper was besides the point.
In between lauding his government's achievements, Modi made two important points in his address.
One, what he considers to be the election-winning mantra for today.
'I would very humbly appeal to every state government in the country, be it left, right, centre, and governments of all ideologies that the results of Bihar give us this lesson that the kind of government you run today will determine the future of your political party in the coming years.'
...'Whether it is our government at the Centre or governments of different parties in the states, our highest priority should be just development, development, and only development. And that is why I say to every state government that compete to create a better investment environment in your state, compete to improve ease of doing business, compete to move ahead on development parameters and then see how the people place their trust in you.'
In other words, focus on development, development, development to win the elections and for your party to remain relevant.
Valid enough, coming from the victor of consecutive elections for who the 2024 Lok Sabha electoral setback, in which the Congress emerged as the main Opposition party for the first time since 2014, is a distant blip, if at all.
Then came the upper cut for the Congress from a dais commemorating Goenka's life and times and his contribution to journalism.
'The scope of Naxalism and Maoist violence has been shrinking rapidly across the country, but it has been growing equally active within the Congress. ...It was the misfortune of the country that the Congress nurtured and supported Maoist terrorism, which rejects the Indian Constitution. And not just in remote forest areas, the Congress also nourished the roots of Naxalism in the cities. The Congress established urban Naxal sympathisers in many big institutions.
'The urban Naxals and Maoist forces that infiltrated the Congress 10-15 years ago have now turned the Congress into the Muslim League-Maoist Congress (MMC). And today, I say this with full responsibility that this Muslim League-Maoist Congress has abandoned national interest for its own selfish motives. Today's Muslim League-Maoist Congress is becoming a major threat to the unity of the country.'
In just three days, the prime minister has travelled from branding the Congress as the 'Muslim League-Maoist Congress' to 'abandoning national interest' and 'becoming a major threat to the national unity of the country'.
Even as it begs the question if the government actually had evidence to back its claim, and if it did why no action under the various laws of the country was being taken, the point remains: Why has the prime minister sharpened his attack on the Congress, painting the party of the freedom movement as being traitorous?
The ratcheted-up condemnation the Congress and its leadership is a carefully thought-out campaign with a definitive outcome.
It may be fodder for the legions of reels-suffused WhatsApp University adherents for who the memes received on their phones have the weight that the Encyclopaedia Britannica had for earlier generations, but there is a deeper game-plan behind the broadside.
Modi himself gave it away in his Friday victory speech: 'A major division in the Congress', which despite various electoral setbacks manages to stay afloat, even if with a reduced voteshare, and remains the only party that can take on Modi nationwide.
The Congress' performance in the Lok Sabha elections showed that it may be down but not out, and Modi is determined to ensure that in the next round in 2029, it is consigned to irrelevance.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
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