Union Minister for Rural Development and Panchayat Raj Jairam Ramesh said on Thursday that the 2014 Lok Sabha elections would a fight between Congress thinking and the Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh’s (RSS) ideology of polarisation.
He said it would not be a contest between Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi.
Ramesh was in Bangalore to attend a seminar and promote the newly enacted Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in Land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Act, 2013.
“In fact I would say that the fight is between the Congress party and the RSS. The last 15 months is evidence enough to suggest that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is a wholly owned subsidiary of the RSS company,” Ramesh said.
Ramesh said while the BJP campaigning depends on a single man, the Congress is projecting the party as a whole.” He said the “deep-rooted insecurity” in the saffron party was the reason for it to focus on Modi and project him as “change.”
He said the Congress and the BJP directly contest in about six states—Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Chattisgarh and Uttarakhand—while in Bihar, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh, regional parties would play a major role.
“In the rest of the states like Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh, the BJP is non-existent. The Congress is the only political party which is fighting at a national level,” he said. The BJP’s real campaign strategy is communal polarisation, while governance and development is being used as mere rhetoric.
“Muzaffarnagar riots are an example of (the BJP) targeting UP and Bihar that are vulnerable to polarisation. Karnataka is not far away (from this strategy),” Ramesh stated.