“BJP Wants People To Vote With Emotions”

On Tuesday, 23 April, Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra accused the BJP of seeking to arouse people’s emotions, distracting them from real issues and taking them for granted, as she targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

She told a news agency, “I don’t think this is the level of discourse that the Prime Minister (Narendra Modi) should be making.”

Priyanka’s comments in the backdrop of allegations by Modi that the Congress plans to give the hard-earned money and valuables of people to “infiltrators” and “those who have more children”, and would steal the “gold of mothers and sisters”, if voted to power.

She said the Prime Minister should, instead, be talking about development. The Congress General Secretary asked, “He has been Prime Minister for ten years and he has enjoyed full majority. What has he actually done? Why is he not able to come in front of people and say I have provided so many jobs, I have created so many IITs, so many hospitals, and pulled so many people out of poverty?”

The Congress leader also accused the BJP of taking the public for granted.

“They think the public is not even going to check the figures they are talking about, the public is not going to check what Congress has said in the manifesto or not, it is available everywhere….every day they come up with something new. One day they say we are working against the country. One day they say we are against religion…while Congress we are continuously harping on jobs, education. We are saying in our manifesto these are the things we want to do,” Priyanka said.

She added, “They (BJP) are talking about anything, but the issues that people are facing. There are so many huge issues, whether it is the farmers, the young students, young people looking for jobs…there are so many big issues and our focus should be on that.”

Priyanka said further, “I don’t want to even get into the other issues, because I think that they are always being raised, so that people get distracted, so that people’s emotions are aroused, and they vote with emotion rather than with understanding of what political parties want to do for them and what political parties will do for them.”

She said further that in the last 10 years, life for most people has not improved. “We hear a lot of things, we see that there are few — three or four, I would say, businessmen who are close to the Prime Minister who are doing very well, but aside from that the common man, actually he is facing much more problems than he was (facing) before. Why are we not addressing that?” Priyanka asked.