Congress leader Jairam Ramesh said on Thursday that demonising Prime Minister Narendra Modi all the time will not help the cause of the Opposition, PTI reported. He added that Modi’s governance model was “not a complete negative story”.
Ramesh made the remarks while launching a book titled Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India, by political analyst Kapil Satish Komireddy. “He [Modi] talks in a language that connects him with the people,” the Congress leader said. “Unless we recognise that he is doing things which people recognise and which have not been done in the past, we are not going to be able to confront this guy. Also, if you are going to demonise him all the time, you are not going to be able to confront him.”
Ramesh said it was due to Modi’s activities between 2014 and 2019 that more than 30% of the electorate voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Lok Sabha elections this year. The BJP secured nearly 37.4% vote, while the Congress bagged just 19.49%.
“Let me tell you it is not a completely negative story when it comes to economics of the governance, the politics of the governance is completely different,” Ramesh said. “The social relations that have been created out of his governance model is also completely different.”
Ramesh said the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana had been successful. “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 PMUJ is one single program which 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.”
The economist said that “something happened” in the last decade due to which Modi went from being a non-entity in the 2009 General Elections to the prime minister after the 2014 polls. He added that the people of the country were not relating the farmers’ distress or other problems to Modi’s performance. “We have to understand what made him respectable,” Ramesh concluded.
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