BJP's Sudhanshu Trivedi calls Rahul Gandhi a 'failed product'; Priyank Kharge asks what RAW is doing

The BJP and the Congress traded charges over Rahul Gandhi’s foreign travel on Friday and into Saturday, after BJP national spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi accused the Leader of Opposition of meeting “questionable individuals” abroad and returning home to run down the country.

“Whenever Rahul Gandhi travels abroad, he visits undisclosed locations and meets with questionable individuals,” Trivedi, who is also a BJP MP, told a press conference in New Delhi on Friday. He said Gandhi then “engages in anti-India propaganda” after coming back.

Early on Saturday Karnataka minister Priyank Kharge turned the charge back on the government. “Do they not have Intelligence on who Rahul Gandhi is meeting abroad? Is our Intelligence so useless? What is RAW doing?” he said. The BJP spokespersons, he argued, were in effect calling the country’s leadership “the most incompetent EAM, most incompetent HM and the most incompetent PM”. He added: “Show documents if he is indulging in something anti-national.”

‘A failed product’

Trivedi spent much of his press conference on Gandhi’s record as a leader. He said he would present facts and evidence to show that Gandhi was a “failed product”, and said the Congress had sunk to its lowest point under him, unable to cross 50 seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha election.

He recalled Gandhi’s promise to move away from favouring the children of political families, and set it against the present Parliament. “For the first time in the history of the Congress party, three members of the Nehru-Gandhi family, mother, son and daughter, are in Parliament,” he said.

He also went through Gandhi’s working life, saying he had been with the British firm Monitor from 1996 to 1999 and later a director of another company, Backops, from 2003 to 2009, and that both had shut down. A 2014 experiment with choosing candidates through internal elections in 16 constituencies, he said, had produced nothing.

A week of sharper words

Friday’s attack came a day after BJP spokesperson Gaurav Bhatia accused Gandhi of promoting “anarchy and ‘gaddari’” (treachery) and compared him to Mir Jafar. Bhatia and his colleague Pradeep Bhandari cited a Fox News investigation that, they said, tied protests in France to the demonstrations in India demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The Congress had not responded to those claims when they were made.

The opposition has made the CEC and the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls the centre of its campaign. The BJP’s answer at its press conferences this week has been to turn the spotlight on Gandhi himself.