NEW DELHI, Feb 5, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – Prime Minister Narendra Modi is lording
it over India just like the British, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi said in a
blistering pre-election broadside published Tuesday.
Gandhi, great-grandson of India’s first prime minister after independence
from Britain in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, hopes to unseat Modi in the vote due
by May.
“Every institution in India is facing Mr Modi’s autocratic backlash,”
Gandhi, head of the Congress party that has dominated Indian politics for
decades, said in a newspaper interview.
“Mr Modi believes that he is the Lord of India, just like the British
believed,” the 48-year-old told the Hindustan Times daily.
Modi, 68, swept to power in a landslide in 2014 but with voters unhappy
about unemployment and the dire state of Indian agriculture, winning again
may not be so easy.
Congress have been emboldened by state election victories in late 2018.
Gandhi said in the interview that this was “just the tip of the backlash”
against Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“What Mr Modi doesn’t accept is that India today is in a crisis. India has
a massive job crisis, a humongous agriculture crisis, and Indian youngsters
are deeply distressed about their future,” he said.
“This is generating a huge amount of anger.”
Gandhi’s comments about Modi’s “autocratic backlash” referred to a massive
row raging since Sunday between the central government and the premier of the
eastern state of West Bengal, which has made waves nationally.
On Sunday, West Bengal police prevented the Central Bureau of
Investigation (CBI), India’s FBI, from questioning Kolkata’s chief of police
in connection with a multi-million dollar ponzi scheme scandal.
In dramatic scenes played out across national TV channels, the CBI
officials were pushed into police vans, detained briefly, then released.
West Bengal’s firebrand state premier Mamata Banerjee has alleged the CBI
was acting on the orders of Modi’s government.
A public protest she is holding entered its third day on Tuesday. Banerjee
told thousands of supporters that officers of the CBI are being used for
political ends.
India’s top court moved to defuse the standoff Tuesday, ordering the
Kolkata police chief, Rajeev Kumar, to make himself available for questioning
and cooperate with the investigation agency.