By Archana Sharma
Jaipur, March 19 As the 2024 Lok Sabha polls approach, political parties are busy in setting their agendas and boosting the brand image of their leaders.
While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been targeting Congress leader Rahul Gandhi in all its protests, the Congress has been attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi over different issues, making it Modi vs Rahul in the polls.
The state BJP recently launched a protest campaign against the Ashok Gehlot government from Bharatpur on March 15.
Addressing the gathering, BJP leaders demanded an apology from Rahul Gandhi for his statement made in Cambridge. Speaking on the occasion, BJP state president Satish Poonia said that Rahul should be sent to his maternal great grandfather's home and his mother and former Congress president Sonia Gandhi should be sent to her maternal home.
In the same meeting, BJP's Bharatpur district president Jagat Singh said that Rahul has insulted all the countrymen by speaking against the country in a foreign land.
"Prime Minister Narendra Modi should put him in a mental asylum. There he will be treated. I am ready to pay for this. He is a blot on the country," Singh said. Describing all Congressmen as traitors, he said that next time the BJP will come to power with a majority and then the entire Congress party will be put in jail.
The BJP in Rajasthan has been questioning Rahul Gandhi on the promises made by him during the 2018 Assembly polls. They have been rhyming the Bollywood song 'ek, do teen' and asking him why his loan waiver promises have not been fulfilled even in four and a half years when he promised that farm loan waivers will be made within 10 days of the formation of a Congress government.
Meanwhile, the Congress it seems has also read the pulse of the BJP and has started attacking PM Modi on diverse issues.
While CM Gehlot has been attacking him for his silence over OPS, he has equally been reminding him of the ERCP issue and accusing him of turning a deaf ear to people's problems.
Recently Congress Rajasthan in-charge Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa sparked a controversy by saying that if Prime Minister Narendra Modi is finished then India will be saved from industrialists like Gautam Adani.
Randhawa made these remarks while addressing a meeting of party workers in poll-bound Rajasthan during which he asked them to 'defeat' Modi if they want to get rid of industrialists like Adani.
The protest meeting in Jaipur was organised against the BJP government at the Centre for not agreeing to form a Joint Parliamentary Committee to look into the allegations made by the US firm Hindenburg against the Adani Group.
"Modi is destroying the country and the BJP at the Centre is selling the nation, so our fight is not with Adani but directly with the BJP," he said. "Everyone is talking about Adani while they should be talking about Modi. His defeat is important to remove Adani," Randhawa told the Congress workers.
When asked the Congress workers how they feel about it, one of the veteran workers said, "Had the comments been made in the organisational meeting, they might not have come out. In fact, we would have ensured that they did not reach the public. But because Randhawa made these comments publicly, we don't know how to handle it."
The Congress this time remains divided into two factions, one being led by CM Ashok Gehlot and the other by former deputy CM Sachin Pilot.
While the Pilot supporters are aggrieved that he has not been elevated in the organisation and the government, the Gehlot faction remains confident of forming the government for a second time, given their initiatives like the OPS, RGHS, Chiranjeevi health scheme etc.
However, the BJP says the state government has nothing significant to its credit. It is simply busy in attacking Modi to hide its failures in terms of rising unemployment and crime rate in state, said Poonia.
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