Modi’s guarantee is that all his promises will be broken: Tharoor
s his campaign convoy negotiates a maze of narrow panchayat roads at Pazhayakada, south of Thiruvananthapuram city, Shashi Tharoor, the Congress candidate who is seeking a fourth term from the Thiruvananthapuram Lok Sabha constituency, says the BJP with its proclaimed target of 400 seats in the Lok Sabha elections is sure to fall well below that.
In an interview with The Hindu, Dr. Tharoor says the BJP is showing signs of panic. “They realised they maxed out in 2019 their support bases in all States where they were strong. In six States, they won every seat. In three, they won all but one seat. In two States, they won all but two. In those 11 States, with the possible exception of Gujarat, there is only one way they can go and that’s down. Whereas, in every case, surveys indicate that the Congress is going up,” he says, calling it a miracle if the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance manages to win 270 seats.
AThis why the BJP has unsuccessfully, “almost embarrassingly for the party”, tried to woo back smaller parties such as the BJD and Akali Dal. The BJP just gave three promises to the people of Thiruvananthapuram in the last 10 years – setting up an All India Institute of Medical Sciences, a National University of Ayurveda, and upgrade of the National Institute of Speech and Hearing to a National University for Disability Studies. All three were broken. So, when their candidate comes and talks fatuously about Modi ki guarantee, the only guarantee we have got from Modi is that his promises will all be broken, says Dr. Tharoor.
He sees anti-incumbency against the State government inuencing the polls in favour of the United Democratic Front (UDF) led by the Congress.
On the Election Commission censuring him for making alleged statements against his rival candidate, he says he was only conrming to a journalist that he also heard what the journalist had heard.
He has been able to dispel coastal people’s doubts about his stance on the Vizhinjam port issue. “My stand, that the port cannot be closed after its construction, is actually the stand of every other party. The only dierence is I spoke openly. On all their other demands, I had stood strongly with the people,” says Dr. Tharoor.
To a question on his alleged soft Hindutva line, Dr. Tharoor says his book Why I Am a Hindu explains why Hindutva is a betrayal of the essentials of Hinduism. “My critique of Hindutva from within Hinduism is probably more potent than giving them [Sangh Parivar] the opportunity to dismiss the earlier critiques as those of godless secularists,” he says.
On the allegation that the Congress is mute on the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, Dr. Tharoor says he opposed it on the oor of the Lok Sabha and outside and was the rst MP to go to Shaheen Bagh and join the cause.
Full interview: https://newsth.live/Tharoor