Demonising PM Modi all the time won’t help: Congress’ Jairam Ramesh

“He (Modi) talks in a language that connects him with the people. If you are going to demonize him all the time, you are not going to be able to confront him,” PTI quoted Ramesh as saying.

Ramesh, who held portfolios of Rural Development, and Drinking Water and Sanitation ministries in the UPA government, further asserted that PM Modi’s “economics of governance” was not a negative story altogether.

“In 2019, all of us in the political discourse made fun of one or two of his programmes. But it has turned out in all electoral studies that the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana is one single programme that has been able to connect him with crores and crores of women and given him the political traction which he didn’t have in 2014,” said the Rajya Sabha member from Karnataka.

“Now if we are going to run this down and say this is all hocus pocus and say these are wrong numbers, we are not going to confront this guy,” Ramesh said.

On Modi’s rise from a “non-entity in national politics” in 2009 to becoming a two-time prime minister, Ramesh said people of the country were not holding him responsible for the current distress in the country.

“We talked about farmers distress through out our entire campaign. People realise there was farmers’ distress but they did not hold Modi responsible for it. You saw what happened in the election results thereafter. We have to understand what made him respectable,” he said.

(With PTI inputs)

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