Stop the Political Tandav, Connect with People: Amit Shah

Union Home Minister Amit Shah on Tuesday asked the Opposition, particularly Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, to stop indulging in negative politics. Addressing a press conference after the BJP’s sweeping victory in Gujarat’s local body polls, Amit Shah said the Congress had not won in the state in the last 41 years. It had also failed to win elections for three to five decades in states such as West Bengal, Tripura and Tamil Nadu.

He asked Rahul Gandhi whether the Congress’s continuous defeats over several decades were also due to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. He pointed out that the SIR exercise began only after 2024. The Congress and the LoP, he said, needed to introspect rather than resort to street theatrics.

Referring to Tuesday’s rally, Shah said mobilising party cadres from other states and bringing them onto the streets of Delhi might create a favourable impression, but it would not yield any results. He said voters across the country had repeatedly demonstrated their support for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the BJP and the NDA in elections. He asserted that the BJP-led NDA would once again win the Lok Sabha elections with a comfortable majority and that Rahul Gandhi should mentally prepare himself for another defeat.

Amit Shah also took a dig at the Congress’s demand for scrapping Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) and reintroducing ballot papers. He pointed out that local body and municipal elections were not all conducted using EVMs, yet the Congress had lost those elections too. The party, therefore, should stop blaming EVMs for its defeats, he said.

Shah said that the presence of a few thousand party activists on the streets of Delhi meant little. The real India, he argued, lived elsewhere, and the Congress needed to reach out to people, convince them and contest elections democratically. He also questioned the party’s selective approach to the SIR issue, alleging that it blamed the exercise where it lost but remained silent where it won.

The kind of negative politics the Congress was engaging in would not benefit the party, Shah said, adding that it needed to understand the people and reconnect with the public.