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Indian election: cow vigilantes, GST, job losses. Voters should have the Modi blues ... so why is Gandhi’s Congress set to fail?
- Religious violence, an unpopular tax, disappearing jobs. India’s voters have plenty to judge Prime Minister Narendra Modi on come election time
- So why is the opposition Congress – led by a Gandhi – struggling to make anything stick?
Reading Time:10 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
It was supposed to be the day the Indian opposition seized the election narrative; instead, it felt like a demonstration in how to lose it.
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When the Indian National Congress party president Rahul Gandhi announced the flagship policy he hopes will win the approval of an electorate nearly a billion-strong, he was determined not to go off topic. Indeed, he had made this clear to multiple reporters gathered at his March 25 press conference: he would be talking about the minimum income guarantee scheme, under which Congress has pledged to pay India’s poorest 20 per cent of families 6,000 rupees (US$90) a month. And he would be talking only about that scheme.
That seemed like a good move on the part of Gandhi, a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family that has been supplying India with prime ministers ever since the country’s independence in 1947. After all, the scheme has an obvious appeal given that the incumbent prime minister, Narendra Modi, and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have come under fire for mishandling the economy with two of their signature policies: a demonetisation drive in which the country’s largest banknotes were taken out of circulation and the introduction of a goods and services tax, both of which have caused major upheaval and nuisance to ordinary citizens.
So perhaps it was not surprising that when a journalist interrupted Gandhi with a question about another topic, he became flustered.
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But what Gandhi did next showed he was guilty of something India’s disillusioned voters often accuse their politicians of doing: not listening.
The journalist asked Gandhi about government subsidies; yet Gandhi admonished him as if he had brought up an entirely different subject – a scandal surrounding the government’s deal to buy 36 Rafale fighter aircraft from the French company Dassault.
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