Though Congress president Rahul Gandhi’s continuing campaign on the Rafale jet deal has unsettled the Bharatiya Janata Party and pushed it on the defensive, the ongoing controversy is yet to resonate with the masses.
The Opposition has alleged two irregularities in the deal to buy 36 fighter jets from France’s Dassault Aviation for Rs 58,000 crore. First, it claims that the price of the jets is grossly inflated and far higher than that being negotiated by the previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government. Second, it claims that the terms of the deal were changed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to benefit industrialist Anil Ambani.
The controversy has become the subject of animated discussion on television channels and is gradually emerging as a talking point among the country’s elite. It has, however, failed to evoke the kind of outrage and anger that was witnessed in the eighties when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was engulfed in a controversy over the purchase of the Bofors gun from Sweden. To that extent, it can be said that Rahul Gandhi has failed to make Rafale into a hot-button electoral issue
While the Congress believes the Rafale deal will snowball into a major issue in the coming days, its inability to excite the electorate about the irregularities in the defence agreement is being attributed largely to the Congress president’s poor articulation of the key facts.
Party insiders admitted that though Gandhi is armed with powerful facts, he is unable to communicate these in a way so as to connect with his audience. He has a tendency to repeat the same points giving the distinct impression that he has rehearsed his arguments, and is unable to go beyond the written script. They maintain that the Congress needs someone like Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Lalu Prasad Yadav who has the necessary communication skills to get the message across in an idiom which can be understood by a rustic audience. A senior Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh said, “People in villages often ask us: ‘What is all this controversy over the ‘rakhel’ [mistress] brought from France.’”
