Gujarat polls: Thanks to the Congress, it's time to start praying
The Gujarat elections are upon us; the campaigning for the first phase is over, the Congress, the BJP and other parties have nauseated the citizenry by the depths to which they have sunk in flinging abuse at one another. Will Modi win the election? Awful as it is, the answer is yes. And for this, we can only blame the Congress.
Forget the crudity of Sonia Gandhi's "maut ke saudagar" remark, one that has offended not only Modi et al but the vast majority of citizenry in India. Go back to the riots of 2002. Then, and till today, the Congress has fought shy of condemning the slaughter of innocents - be they Hindus in Godhra or Muslims in the riots that followed and that still haunt the nation. Then, Narendra Modi and his government did precious little to stop the slaughter of thousands of Muslims. In fact, there were political leaders belonging to the Sangh Parivar who actively encouraged and even participated in the carnage with the support of the state police. The whole nation knows this, the media has exposed this and continues to expose this in pitiless detail. Yet, neither the mass murderers nor those who incited them have been brought to justice. But the real horror is that today, many among those erstwhile BJP political leaders—inciters of rape and murder—have actually become members of the Congress party!
The bitter truth is that while the Sangh Parivar outfits are brazenly communal, the Congress is equally communal but seeks to conceal its bigotry beneath veils of hypocritical platitudes to the casue of 'secularism'. This is why today the Congress has among its members many rabidly communal leaders of the Shiv Sena—even though these leaders have been indicted by the Srikrishna Panel for participating in the 1992 Mumbai riots that saw thousands of Muslims being killed. This is why till today, not one Congress leader has been brought to book for inciting the 1984 riots in which thousands of Sikhs were slaughtered.
With what seriousness, then, can the Gujarati citizen or indeed the nation greet the Congress party’s promises to uphold secularism and rule of law? What right does Sonia Gandhi have to call Modi a ‘merchant of death’ when her own party today shelters so many? Addressing an election rally in Rajkot, PM Manmohan Singh declared: “If you are against the Modi government, only God can help you.” The tragedy is, the Gujarati people—indeed the nation— had hoped that rather than God, the Congress would help them evict the BJP. Clearly, it's time to start praying. The Congress, the BJP, even the CPM after Nandigram..all wallow in the same muck.
© R. P. Subramanian., all rights reserved.
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