PM Modi’s sole campaign theme is bashing Pakistan, Muslims and Congress

Though elevated to the highest executive post of the country, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign speeches for the coming Lok Sabha election are no different from the demagoguery he had resorted to all through the Gujarat Assembly polls in 2002, 2007, 2012 and 2017.

The sole purpose of his election speeches is to achieve polarisation of Hindu-Muslim votes. For this, he bashes Pakistan, Muslims and the Congress in one breath and sells himself as ‘Hindu Hriday Samrat’ (King who rules the heart of Hindus’).

In the same vain, Modi paints Muslims and the Congress with the same brush describing them as enemies of Gujarat who are jealous of the ‘progressive’ and ‘nationalist’ Gujaratis.  He describes himself as the son of the soil who stands for the self-respecting fifty million Gujaratis and accuses the Nehru-Gandhi family of scheming against the likes of Sardar Patel and Morarji Desai, two leaders from Gujarat who occupied high positions in Delhi.

Modi warns the people of Gujarat that if they vote a Congress-led government to power, they would invite trouble for Gujarat because, he alleges, the government at the Centre would block its development.

In fact, it was Modi’s first public speech after the 2002 post-Godhra anti-Muslim violence that set the the theme of his campaign speeches for all the subsequent state Assembly and Lok Sabha elections. He took out a ‘Gaurav Yatra’ (March of Glory) three months before the Assembly elections in 2002. It was a brazen move in the wake of world-wide condemnation he had faced for his collusion in the state-sponsored anti-Muslim pogrom.

In this speech, Modi attacked the then Pakistan President, Pervez Musharraf, for sponsoring terrorist activities in Gujarat and blamed the Manmohan Singh government which he alleged was ‘remote controlled’ by UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi for taking a soft stand against terrorism.

By challenging ‘Miya Musharraf’ in his campaign speeches, Modi tried to convert the 2002 Assembly election into one between Pakistan and the BJP. While seeking a second term as the Chief Minister in 2007, Modi took credit for eliminating underworld don Sohrabuddin Sheikh in an encounter with the Gujarat Police.

The Sohrabuddin encounter killing issue was raked up again by the Prime Minister in his election rally in Himmatnagar, north Gujarat, on April 18 when he said only he as the head of government had the courage to take on terrorists and the underworld. Alleging that the Congress had vindictively implicated several top Gujarat Police officers and BJP president Amit Shah in the cases of fake encounter killings, Modi said in the coming Lok Sabha elections, people would give a befitting reply to the ‘anti-Gujarati’ Congress politicians.

On the last day of campaigning for the 2017 Assembly elections too, Modi had raised the bogey of ‘Pakistan’s hand’ in hatching a conspiracy to install Congress leader Ahmed Patel as the Chief Minister. Modi had told a lie that such a conspiracy was hatched at a dinner hosted by Mani Shankar Iyer in Delhi attended among others by a former Indian Army Chief, a former foreign secretary and diplomats who had served in the Indian High Commission in Pakistan.

Modi’s allegation, which received wide media coverage, is said to have helped polarise Hindu votes in favour of the BJP at the last minute before the polling for the state Assembly elections. However, Modi’s lie was nailed later by none else than Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in Parliament.

During the campaigning for the coming Lok Sabha elections too, Modi has invariably worked on the sentiments of Gujaratis (his euphemism for majority Hindus) by saying he is the one and only Prime Minister who knows inch by inch all the lanes and bylanes of Gujarat’s 18,000 villages and towns and thousands of individuals by their names.

“Tell me who else knows Gujarat so intimately,” he asks evoking cheers from his audience.

In half a dozen election rallies that he has addressed in his home state, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has conspicuously avoided any mention of Demonetisation, GST or his much publicised ‘Achche Din’. But as in all of his past election rallies since 2002, Pakistan-sponsored terrorism has remained his favourite theme.