AAP changes tack: No direct attack on Modi, flay BJP instead

After multiple poll reverses, the AAP appears to have dropped its strategy of directly attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi and is now focusing its charge on the BJP as a whole.

A change in the tack was effected after the party’s policy of constantly targeting the prime minister appeared to have had an adverse impact on its poll performances in Punjab, Goa and Delhi.

While the party won 20 of Punjab’s 117 Assembly seats in recent state polls, it drew a blank in the Goa polls. In the Delhi civic body polls, it came second to the BJP.

A case in point is how the beleaguered party reacted to the CBI’S recent visit to the premises of Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia and Health Minister Satyendar Jain for “seeking clarifications” in two different cases.

Vexed by the move, the AAP launched an attack on the agency. “The CBI raids Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia’s residence at the behest of the Bjp-ruled Centre,” the party said.

This was in sharp contrast to the tone the AAP resorted to in the past.

When the agency had raided the office of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal in December 2015, the incensed AAP supremo had accused Modi of misusing the CBI and had called him a “coward” and a “psychopath”.

Amid the run-ins with the Centre, it appeared that Kejriwal was seeking to make the fight between him and Modi, who “was unable to digest the 2015” Delhi Legislative Assembly defeat of the BJP.

Even when Dalits were flogged in Una in Gujarat or after Dalit scholar Rohith Vemula allegedly committed suicide in Hyderabad, Kejriwal’s attack revolved around Modi.