Karnataka Cong’s ‘vocal for local’ script comes unstuck after Kharge’s jibe at PM

“This election is not about Modi…this election is not about any leader, whichever party they belong to. This election is about your Karnataka, your pride, your state, your everyday life which has been messed up by their (incumbent BJP’s) loot,” she said.

It is not just Priyanka. And it is not just Karnataka. The Congress had been trying hard in various Assembly elections in state after state in recent years to keep its campaign strictly local and avoid attacking PM Modi personally. The party has stuck to its script on many occasions and deviated a couple of times.

It is another matter that despite deploying such tactics, success in these polls, barring Himachal Pradesh last year, has been eluding the grand old party for long.

Most of the Karnataka Congress leaders, too, were of the view that the party’s campaign for the May 10 Assembly polls should be on state-level issues, whose target should be the Basavaraj Bommai-led BJP government.

The state Congress is keen on sticking to its “40 per cent commission sarkara” line of attack against the Bommai government, focusing on several guarantees that the party has pledged for the electorate besides promises like holding a caste census and rejigging the reservation matrix in the state.

The guarantees include a monthly unemployment allowance of Rs 3,000 for graduates and Rs 1,500 for diploma holders for two years, or Yuva Nidhi; 200 units of free electricity for all families, or Gruha Jyothi; Rs 2,000 per month for the female head of the family, or Gruha Lakshmi; and 10 kg rice for BPL families, called the Anna Bhagya scheme.

While Rahul and Priyanka have been targeting the Modi dispensation on issues of governance, they have also broadly stuck to the carefully crafted Congress strategy to keep its campaign “vocal for local (issues)”.

This strategy seems to have come undone now with party president Mallikarjun Kharge’s “venomous snake” jab at the PM. As expected, the BJP has raised a storm against Kharge and even approached the Election Commission to demand barring of the Congress chief from campaigning in his home state.

Kharge had found himself at the centre of a similar controversy last year during the Gujarat Assembly elections when he, while addressing a public meeting in Ahmedabad’s Behrampura, said, “We see your (Modi’s) face in corporation elections, MLA elections or MP elections, everywhere… Do you have 100 heads like Ravan?”

The BJP had then accused Kharge of likening the PM to Ravan. Kharge’s latest remark reminded some Congress leaders of Mani Shankar Aiyar’s “neech kisam ka aadmi” jibe at Modi in 2017 and Sonia Gandhi’s “maut ka saudagar” salvo fired at him during the 2007 Gujarat polls.

Kharge, in a damage control exercise, has said his “poisonous snake” remark was aimed at the BJP ideology and was not a personal attack on any individual.