By IANS
New Delhi : Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) general secretary Prakash Karat has attacked the Congress party for not raising anti-communal issues during the Gujarat election campaign.
He also said in an editorial in the CPI-M mouthpiece “People’s Democracy” that it was wrong to view Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s politics separately from that of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Hindutva brigade.
“Modi is a product of this communal movement and to view his politics and persona separately from that of the RSS-Hindutva brigade is a serious error,” Karat said.
In the run up to the Gujarat elections, there had been reports that Modi had been isolated by RSS and affiliated groups like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad. The BJP won 117 of the 182 seats in the state assembly.
“Modi has been truthful when after the elections he decried all the efforts to project him as bigger than the BJP or the Sangh. Just as, in another context, (former prime minister) Atal Bihari Vajpayee was inaccurately seen as the ‘right man in the wrong party’, Modi cannot be seen as anything but a creature of the Sangh combine,” Karat said.
Saying the Congress failed to build a platform against communal forces, the editorial said: “The Congress, as the main opposition in Gujarat, has shirked doing so. On the contrary, the predominant attitude has been to avoid raising anti-communal issues on the plea that it will help the BJP to polarise the people. This is a short-sighted and harmful approach.
“Avoiding a forthright stance against the communal platform; depicting a contradiction between Modi and the BJP-RSS combine; and hoping for normal issues of bourgeois politics to assert themselves are all symptoms of how flawed was the strategy to fight the BJP in these elections.”
He alleged that the Congress was “not inclined to oppose the BJP government’s policies in any determined fashion”.