LUTYENS MOLES WORK TO DAMAGE PM MODI

‘Out of 11 senior bureaucrats who were involved in the planning of the currency switch’, two are still ‘one hundred per cent loyal to the Lutyens Zone’.

India’s “Lutyens Zone” (analogous to the “Washington Beltway”) went into overdrive from 16 May 2014 to ensure that Narendra Modi becomes a singleterm Prime Minister or even be forced to quit his office in between, as took place during 1979 in the case of the other PM from Gujarat, Morarji Desai. This strategy cannot be dismissed as impossible to implement. Although Rahul Gandhi has often been dismissed as an intellectual lightweight by several of his peers, accord- ing to a credible strategist working in the interests of the Lutyens Zone, the fact is that the vice-president of the All India Congress Committee “has been working to a plan to derail Modi from the start”. According to this source and another highly placed individual who has served as a core planner for the Lutyens Zone (LZ) leadership since the 1980s, the contra-Modi plan was “accelerated to take-off speed after he (Rahul) took effective charge of the Congress in November 2015”. The duo outlined the LZ “plan of action” since the shock collapse of the Congress in the 2014 polls. “We never expected the BJP to get a majority on its own, nor the Congress tally to go below 110”, the two significant sources said, adding that “it took about 19 months after 16 May 2014 before we were able to work out a plan capable of ensuring that the NDA would not return to power in 2019”. Both said that Rahul Gandhi “embraced the strategy fully, unlike those in his party who had been in leadership positions during the Manmohan decade”. These wanted to “continue with the past policy of cutting private deals with the BJP and putting on only a mock defiance of the new government”. From the start of mid2015, when his grip over the rudder strengthened at the expense of the old guard of the AICC, Congress vicepresident Rahul Gandhi “accepted our (dominant Lutyens Zone) view that with Narendra Modi in the Prime Minister’s chair, it had to be total war”, although sometimes cloaked in the language of conciliation. “Rahul understood that India would change fundamentally were Modi to win a second term or to have an unobstructed run in his present term”, the insider claimed, adding that “over the opposition of leadership elements in the Congress, Rahul insisted on a policy of complete opposition to the Modi government” so as to ensure that key measures such as the Land Bill or GST would not get passed early or preferably ever in the term of the Modi-led NDA.

According to them, “part of the strategy was to give misleading signals during Parliamentary sessions to those in the BJP who had been interlocutors with the Congress in the past”. These were informed that compromise was around the corner, when it was actually out of