With the Modi Government implementing the Citizen Amendment Act right on the eve of the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, the messaging is very clear. It’s a two tier message, the primary one being that this is a government that has delivered on all its poll promises. The second, is the subliminal messaging that is being sent to the minority community. Both work in terms of the messaging this government wants to send to the BJP voters.
In fact the CAA was passed as far back as December 2019 but the government waited nearly five years before giving the go-ahead for its implementation. That itself is interesting. We are told that the CAA does not necessarily mean that the much more controversial National Register of Citizenship (NRC) will follow. That the CAA decision was also announced on the same day that the Supreme Court ordered the government to go ahead and disclose the names of those who purchased electoral bonds has its own value in terms of distracting the news cycle.
And this is where the Congress faces its biggest challenge – in being able to wrest the narrative away from Modi and his team. Whenever the Congress feels it has scored a debating point against the BJP, the PM makes an announcement that totally overshadows whatever point the Opposition is trying to score. Take for instance when the INDIA bloc met in Mumbai and were all set to choose a convenor and go forward with seat sharing. They were also pretty chuffed with the I.N.D.I.A name playing it against the BJPs plank of nationalism. Well they got the optics and the headlines but only for a day as the very next day the Prime Minister – or rather the President of India issues an invite to the G 23 leaders using the name Bharat instead of India. Soon after the PMO floated the idea of one nation one election and called for a Special Session of Parliament. As the opposition scrambled to counter this, the parliament when it met, focused on altogether another issue, that of women reservations.
Even more recently when Lalu Yadav made an attack against the Prime Minister for not having a family and not following the tradition of shaving off his hair when he performed the last rites for his mother, the BJP spin machine went on overdrive. IT got each and every Union Minister and BJP karyakarta to change their twitter handle to Modi Ka Parivar. This effectively countered the claim that the PM had no family. Though if you ask me, that charge did the INDIA bloc no credit for it only focused on the parivarvaad and the cluster of dynasts within rather than discredit the PM in any way.
Hence if the I.N.D.I.A bloc needs to counter the Prime Minister, it needs to really work on its messaging.