How Digvijaya has jinxed Bharat Jodo's success with surgical strike remarks

Congress veteran Digvijaya Singh has, yet again, landed his party in a soup. Addressing a public meeting in Jammu on January 23 (Monday) during the ongoing Bharat Jodo Yatra, of which he is also the national coordinator, Singh questioned the veracity of the Narendra Modi government’s claims over the 2016 surgical strike by the Indian Armed Forces against Pakistan.

“They talk about the surgical strike; that we killed so many people but there is no proof. They are ruling only through peddling lies,” Singh said. Stating that 40 CRPF jawans had been martyred in Pulwama during a terror attack by Pakistan in February 2019, the former Madhya Pradesh chief minister also claimed, “CRPF officials had requested the Prime Minister that personnel should be airlifted, but Modi didn’t agree. How did such a lapse take place? Till date, no report on Pulwama has been placed before Parliament.”

Ill-timed statement

The enormity of Singh’s self-goal for Team Congress could be gauged from the fact that his comments, promptly dubbed by the BJP as those “questioning the valour of our Armed Forces”, came on Paramkram Diwas, the birth anniversary of Subhas Chandra Bose, and at a time when Prime Minister Modi was busy naming 21 of Andaman and Nicobar’s unnamed islands after Param Vir Chakra awardees.

The BJP, expectedly, latched on to Singh’s statements “against our security forces” with its spokespersons Gaurav Bhatia and Shehzad Poonawalla variously slamming the Congress “once again echoing the views of Pakistan” and questioning the party’s patriotism. With Parliament’s budget session due to commence from January 31, it is expected that more prominent and senior members of the government as well as the BJP organisation will join this chorus soon.

Congress distances itself

A red-faced Congress desperately sought to distance itself from the controversial remarks made by one of its most prominent leaders with the party’s communications chief Jairam Ramesh asserting that Singh’s views were “his own and do not reflect the position of the Congress”. Ramesh added that surgical strikes had also been carried out before 2014 by the UPA government – a line Congress veterans P Chidambaram and Anand Sharma had first toed when Singh made similar comments about the surgical strikes in October 2016. “Congress has supported and will continue to support all military actions that are in the national interest,” Ramesh added.

Also read: Digvijaya Singh questions surgical strikes; BJP calls it an ‘insult’ of Army

That Singh had made Ramesh’s already difficult task of handling the Congress’s communication strategy much harder with his own surgical strike was evident in the way Ramesh practically shoved aside a reporter who was trying to quiz the former MP chief minister on his remarks during the Bharat Jodo Yatra later in the day. As the reporter persisted, Ramesh, who was walking in the yatra alongside Singh, shot back, “only questions on Bharat Jodo”.

A while later Singh also put out a tweet questioning why the Modi government had failed to explain till date how 300 kilograms of RDX explosives used by Pakistani terrorists in the 2019 attack had arrived in Pulwama undetected by the security agencies. “We also want to know from the Prime Minister (Modi) what kind of relationship he shares with the PM of Pakistan… they both praise each other,” Singh added.

To be fair to Singh, this wasn’t the first time he was airing these views nor was he the only one in the Congress to have made such remarks publicly. Singh had questioned the veracity of the surgical strikes in October 2016 too, just days after then Congress chief Sonia Gandhi had congratulated the Indian Armed Forces “on the success of the operation” and offered her party’s “support to the government in our country’s continuing battle against cross-border terrorism”.

As such, Singh has merely reiterated something that he and some of his other party colleagues too have said in the past. However, the political backlash that Singh’s fresh statements have triggered couldn’t come at a worse time for the Congress party.

Fresh ammo for BJP

In one fell swoop, the Congress veteran has given the BJP fresh and potent ammunition to come charging at his party when Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra is days away from its culmination in Srinagar on January 30. One of the undeniable successes of the yatra over the past four months of its journey from Kanyakumari had been the BJP’s inability to attack Rahul or the Congress on anything of substantive political merit. With Rahul adroitly skirting political controversies through the yatra, with the one exception of his strident critique of VD Savarkar in Maharashtra back in November, all the BJP could find to criticise was Rahul’s growing beard, his shoes and his T-shirt.

Also read: Bharat Jodo Yatra: Rahul vows to fight for J&K statehood

Now, as Rahul makes his way to Srinagar to hoist the national flag at the Jammu and Kashmir party headquarters and address a mega rally that the Congress hopes would also become a platform for a renewed pitch of Opposition unity against the BJP in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, Singh has breathed new life into the saffron party’s jaded criticism of the Congress as being more sympathetic towards Pakistan than patriotic about India. It’s a pitch that Modi has used remarkably well to further the BJP’s electoral interests in the past while isolating the Congress.

The Prime Minister is unlikely to let go of this chance readily offered by Singh to revive an effective and emotive, even if seemingly rancid, rhetoric of jingoistic nationalism. With the current year packed with high stakes state assembly polls and the next Lok Sabha elections due in April-May next year, Singh has given to the BJP just the angle it needed to bring back Pakistan – and the ancillary references to Islamic terror, surgical strikes, Balakot, valour and martyrdom of the Indian Armed Forces, et al – prominently into its electoral lexicon.

Party livid at Singh?

To say that the Congress is livid at the turn of events would be an understatement. “Just when we thought we were getting our electoral narrative back on track with the Bharat Jodo Yatra and Rahul’s emphasis on issues like unemployment, price rise and the economic crisis, this loose cannon (Singh) had to go off… we have been cornering Modi on the issue of Chinese incursions into Indian territory for the past three or four sessions of Parliament and the issue is again on the Opposition’s agenda for the upcoming budget session but Singh has given the BJP an exit strategy… now when we ask about China, they (BJP leaders) will bring up surgical strikes,” a Congress spokesperson told The Federal.

Another party spokesperson and Lok Sabha MP said, “the PM and everyone else in the BJP has been struggling to answer questions raised by Rahul Gandhi through the Bharat Jodo Yatra but now Digvijaya Singh has revived this Pakistan theatre when the issue had lost political relevance… he is among our senior-most leaders, he is the coordinator of the BJY and is seen with Rahul ji everyday; did he not think even once what kind of political message his statement would send and how the BJP would milk it in all the elections that lie ahead?”

Rahul is scheduled to address a press conference in Jammu at 1 PM on Tuesday (January 24). It is obvious that he would be asked to take a position on what Singh has said. Notwithstanding whether Singh shares the stage with Rahul as he has done in press conferences previously addressed by the Wayanad MP during the BJY, these questions are bound to make for poor optics.

The former Congress chief is expected to reiterate that his party has officially issued a statement making its line clear and that questions on the surgical strike are meant to divert attention from the real issues of unemployment, price rise and communal disharmony that the BJY is raising. Yet, even if he doesn’t respond to questions on Singh’s remarks, the Congress’s media managers say the press is bound to play up negatively anything Rahul says on the matter.

Also read: Wearing raincoat, Rahul leads Bharat Jodo Yatra in Jammu

“This is going to be Rahul’s last Bharat Jodo Yatra press conference and since it is happening in Jammu and days before we reach Srinagar, there are bound to be tricky questions on Article 370, J&K statehood, the Armed Forces and possibly the AFSPA and other controversial matters. We could have surely done without a controversy like the one Singh has created,” a Congress leader who is among the party’s media coordinators for BJY’s J&K leg told The Federal. The leader added, “we got through four months of the yatra without getting trapped into issues that the BJP wants us to talk about but now, just before the yatra ends, we have walked into a minefield – all thanks to one completely avoidable and unnecessary statement,”