Buoyed by the electoral verdict in the Hindi heartland states, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday declared that his party together with a combined opposition will defeat Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections.
“With a resurgent Congress in these states (Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh), and with a combined opposition, it will be very difficult for the prime minister and the BJP to win the Lok Sabha election,” a confident and pleased looking Gandhi said addressing the media at the AICC headquarters in New Delhi.
Gandhi said that the clear message coming out of the elections is that the country is not happy with the Modi regime's decisions on demonetisation and GST. The people of the country feel that what was committed by Modi before the previous Lok Sabha elections has not been fulfilled, he added.
Gandhi also said that Rafale allegations were an issue in the elections as people now feel that Modi himself is corrupt. The narrative for 2019 elections, he said, will comprise employment, farmers' issues and corruption, and part of the mix would be the “mismanagement of the economy”.
Asked about the possibility of getting the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party on board for an opposition alliance, Gandhi said the ideology of the two parties was the same as that of the Congress and opposed to that of the BJP. “We had a meeting of the opposition parties. We are strongly united and we will fight together,” he said
“The prime minister is paralysed. He is not able to respond. He is unable to take the pressure coming from the opposition,” Gandhi said.
The Congress president said the new governments in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh will live up to the expectations of the people, asserting that the promise of farm loan waiver would be worked upon at the earliest.
To a question on EVMs, he said the people of the country are questioning the voting machines, and these questions will have to be addressed. “The issue of concern is that it is an electronic system, and there is a chip in the EVM that can be manipulated. This cannot be done in a manual election,” he said.
On his journey over the last one year as president of the Congress, Gandhi struck a personal note, saying, “I was speaking to my mother yesterday. And I told her that the absolute best thing to happen was losing the 2014 election. I learnt a lot because of that...Mr Narendra Modi has taught me that lesson.”
He said that Modi had got a massive opportunity five years ago to transform the country, but “he refused to listen to the heartbeat of the country, the youngsters, the farmers,” also noting that a certain amount of arrogance had come into him.
