The Congress chief ministers are lagging behind in launching offensive against the BJP’s chief election manager Narendra Modi who is building up the campaign on Hindu polarisation.
The Congress has been in power in key states like Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Assam, Kerala, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Delhi. But the party chief ministers appear to be unwilling to take on Mr Modi either on his Hindu agenda or expose his Gujarat development model.
Some Central leaders, including a few Union ministers, do attack Mr Modi but this is not sufficient without regional leaders, feel party insiders.
A former Union minister on Tuesday said the Congress must initiate a debate on “soft Hindutva and the aggressive secularism”. He said Mr Modi is taking the BJP back to the basics — the Jana Sangha avatar — thereby virtually dumping the Atal Behari Vajpayee line of inclusive politics.
He has virtually marginalised his competitors in the BJP and thus projecting that the coming electoral battle will be Modi versus the rest, he observed.
A Biju Janata Dal leader said neither the Congress nor the BJP are fighting the coming Lok Sabha elections for power. This is because both of them have realised that they cannot win the battle on their own.
“In fact, top leaders in the two parties are predicting the next Lok Sabha will be short-lived and there will be general elections in 2016,” he said.
According to sources, Mr Modi’s priority is to focus on the BJP’s core issues sending out a clear message to its political constituency that the party is not diluting it.
“Watch him carefully, he is not attacking anti-Congress parties. His appeal to make India free from the Congress will enthuse the BJP workers,” they predicted.
But the Congress leaders view that Mr Modi will be spent force by the time of the general elections.
This is because he has launched the campaign much before the elections and will get exhausted at the time of the real battle.