New Delhi: The BJP has taken offence to Rahul Gandhi criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi while he was on foreign soil.
But the BJP cannot criticise Rahul beyond a point for speaking ill of the PM while on foreign soil because the PM himself is guilty of the same.
Rahul, in his interaction with students of the University of California, Berkeley, said “violence, anger and the politics of polarisation have raised their ugly head in India”.
He went on to flay the Modi government saying “the politics of polarisation is very dangerous. Hatred, anger and violence can destroy us. Liberal journalists are being shot. People are being lynched, Dalits are being killed over suspicions of carrying beef, Muslims are killed over suspicions of eating beef, all this is new in India.”
The BJP has also taken offence to the attack on ‘New India’, a construct that the PM himself had coined in his Independence Day speech.
There was a decades-long informal understanding that Prime Ministers while on official visits abroad will not bring in domestic politics or criticise opposition parties or personalities. Modi broke this convention in his very first visit to the US in 2014 after becoming the PM.
He had spoken about “scam India” and how he got a scam infested system in “virasat”. He followed that up in his next visit to the US where he talked about “damaad making Rs 1,000 crores”, a clear reference to Robert Vadra and the allegations of corruption against him.
During his visit to Germany in 2015, PM Modi had said that India was “begging earlier and will not beg any more”, evoking sharp criticism from Congress.
On his maiden visit to China in May 2015, Modi had even gone on to say that people had at one point of time considered it a “misfortune” to be born in India and ashamed to be called an Indian.
Rahul Gandhi was not exactly admiring Modi in his comments at Berkeley. But he can’t be accused of doing anything that the Prime Minister did not.
At one point Rahul even acknowledged Modi’s skills as an orator. He even said the PM was a better speaker than him. So it was not just criticism for the sake of it.
As the political slugfest continues, one thing is clear the convention of not washing domestic dirty linen while abroad is now pretty much dead and buried. This is the new normal. And the government and the opposition better get used to it.
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