New Delhi: In his first campaign rally in poll-bound Delhi, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi Monday attacked former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, saying the AAP chief follows the same playbook as Prime Minister Narendra Modi in “spreading propaganda and lies”.
“There is no difference between them,” Rahul said, addressing a rally in the Muslim-dominated Seelampur assembly constituency.
While the Delhi unit of the Congress has often put Kejriwal in the same bracket as Modi, the Congress high command has largely desisted from criticising the AAP in public forums ever since the Opposition’s INDIA bloc came into being in June 2023.
“Do you remember Delhi under Sheila Dikshit? Then came Kejriwal, who indulged in a lot of publicity. He promised to turn Delhi into Paris and remove corruption. Today, the situation is such that one cannot even walk outside due to pollution. Price rise is rampant, and so is corruption. Kejriwal follows the same strategy as Modi in terms of propaganda and lies,” said Rahul.
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To be sure, Rahul has made statements against Kejriwal in the past. For instance, during the 2022 assembly elections in Punjab, he accused Kejriwal of staying at the “home of terrorists”, suggesting that the AAP chief had links with Khalistanis. However, the compulsions of coalition politics had, of late, forced the Congress party to adopt a softer approach.
The two parties even jointly contested the Lok Sabha polls in Delhi, Haryana, Gujarat, Chandigarh and Goa.
In his speech Monday, Rahul, who addressed a rally against Kejriwal’s arrest in the excise policy case ahead of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, however, made no mention of the ongoing ED and CBI probes against the AAP supremo.
The Lok Sabha Leader of Opposition was also silent on the alleged irregularities in the renovation of the former Delhi CM’s residence during Kejriwal’s tenure at the helm of the state.
However, Rahul listed other instances to draw parallels between the politics of Kejriwal and Modi, signalling his approval of the line adopted by the Congress’s Delhi unit in aggressively taking on the AAP ahead of the 5 February state election in a bid to recover some ground in what was once the party’s bastion.
Rahul said Kejriwal, like Modi, would never speak out against industrialists such as Gautam Adani.
“A handful of industrialists control the country. Have you ever seen Narendra Modi say anything about them? Has Kejriwal said anything on Adani? They don’t utter a word. Whereas I am very clear that I don’t want a country controlled by a handful of billionaires,” he said.
On similar lines, Rahul said that Kejriwal and Modi appear to be on the same page on the issue of a caste census in Delhi and the rest of the country.
“You go ask Kejriwal and ask him to say publicly—whether he wants to enhance reservation for the backward castes. We will carry out a caste census in Delhi,” he said in his address in Seelampur.
Seelampur is located in Northeast Delhi, which, in February 2020, was singed by communal riots, days after the last assembly polls in Delhi. Rahul did not invoke the violence in his speech but subtly criticised the approach of the AAP during the riots.
“Whenever there will be violence against you, you will find me standing right beside you. That is the difference between us and the others. These are our records. We said we would fight against the ideology of the BJP, and we walked 4,000 kilometres across India. We have been against RSS-BJP all our lives and shall remain so,” he said.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
