[Reader-list] HATE DOES NOT WORK

[Bipin Trivedi]

HATE DOES NOT WORK. It’s time Congress realized this truth

The PIONEER EDIT DESK

http://www.dailypioneer.com/284472/Hate-does-not-work.html

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s victory in the Gujarat Assembly by election in Kathlal constituency is a resounding slap in the face of the Congress that has stepped up its motivated campaign of slander and worse against Chief Minister Narendra Modi and the party after the CBI framed and arrested former Minister of State for Home Amit Shah in the alleged Sohrabuddin fake encounter case. The Congress may now seek to downplay the election outcome as being ‘unrepresentative’ of the political mood in the State as a whole and, therefore, inconsequential, but it cannot ignore the fact that it has lost this seat for the first time in 50 years, and that too with a spectacular margin of more than 21,000 votes. Nor can the party pretend to gloss over the fact that Kathlal is in central Gujarat, a region which has Since the setback for the Congress comes ahead of crucial civic elections in the State in October, the party should feel worried. The last big win the Congress has had in Gujarat was during the 2001 municipal elections; since then, it has been a downswing all along. Despite its vitriolic attacks on Mr. Modi and efforts to discredit him, the Congress has miserably failed to mobilize opinion in its favour. Yet, despite the repeated electoral setbacks the Congress has suffered since 2002, it has been — and continues to remain — reluctant to abandon its ‘Hate Modi’ campaign, scripted by ‘secular’ jholawallahs who neither contest elections nor are accountable to the people. Their larger-than-life image propagated by a biased media and their proximity to certain leaders in the Congress allows them the opportunity to decide for the party what should it be its political line in Gujarat. That apart, there’s an important lesson for everybody to be learned from successive election