Hi Or Bye?

Poor? Debt-ridden? Desperate? The Congress promises to repair India (and itself ) if it gets job.

- Puneet Nicholas Yadav

Within a couple of days, the prime minister had to take to outer space to change the narrative. Soon enough, the usual choristers and critics were out fighting online. “Only Narendra Modi could have done it,” said one side. “Surgical strike on jehadi aliens,” said a twitter wit. What compelled him, though, to strain at the leashes of the Model Code of Conduct and make a statement of India's space capabilities? Something that was happening back in the space of terrestrial reality. his chief rival, the Congress, has been behaving a bit like a shooting star in recent times—one minute it’s on a brilliant surge, the next minute you can’t see the damn thing. But early this week, it had shaken off the supine defeatism it sometimes exhibits and come out with a policy promise that got everyone talking.

The jury is still out on whether Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s poll promise to 20 per cent of India’s poorest of a minimum income guarantee of Rs 72,000 per annum is a fiscally prudent idea. Or, in the immediate term, whether it can be a game-changer in the Lok Sabha polls. But the question was evidently urgent enough for the Modi dispensation to respond with something dramatic—to up the game from aerial dogfights to space missiles. For, after over a month of being in an awkward reactive mode since Pulwama-Balakot, it seemed as if the Congress had succeeded in steering the Lok Sabha poll narrative away from the BJP’s chest-thumping triumphalism.