Congress game is over.... I am not saying this -- so says neo-anti-Modi 'sickular' Tavleen Singh ::::: Look at the tragic-drama as Kharge had to ask his colleagues had they forgotten how to clap !!

 "The leaders of our oldest political party looked defeated and frail. And some promises that they made in their speeches sounded as if they had been taken directly from Narendra Modi’s recent election rallies," writes Tavleen Singh in 'Indian Express'. 

It startled me to find that even the words seemed borrowed. Modi is given to using the word ‘guarantee’ a lot these days, so it would have been wise to at least not use this word. Instead, it was used so many times by the Congress Party’s senior leaders that a reporter asked afterwards what the difference was between Congress guarantees and Modi’s guarantees.

More worrying for me was that some ideas in the Nyaya Patra (Justice Letter) seemed copied from Modi. The Prime Minister has been saying since the beginning of this election season that in his eyes the four castes in India are: youth, women, farmers, and the poor. 

"The Congress President spoke of the four pillars of the party manifesto being: youth, women, farmers, and workers. His speech was received with such apathy by his colleagues that he asked in a sad voice if people had ‘forgotten how to clap’," notes Tavleen -- who was once quite critical of Sonia Gandhi but turned against Narendra Modi around 2015.   

Then Tavleen Singh says about Rahul Gandhi: 

"When it came to Rahul Gandhi’s turn to speak, he repeated what he has said many times since the last general election. He said that Indian democracy and the Indian Constitution have never been more endangered than they are today."

This is something that international democracy watchdogs have often pointed out. Some have gone to the extent of declaring that India is already an ‘elected autocracy’. It is an important issue for our main opposition party to raise. But Rahul has raised it so often, that his message has become devitalised from overuse - she notes in her weekly column for 'Indian Express'. 

"What worries me most about the Nyaya Patra is that the Congress Party’s economic worldview has moved so radically to the Left that it is beginning to sound like the Communist Party." 

The Marxists also released their manifesto last week and they talked of reversing privatisation and introducing strict new taxes on the rich. 

The Congress Party, mercifully, has not gone that far, but has ‘guaranteed’ that unemployed educated young people will be given jobs or apprenticeships worth a lakh of rupees a year. 

"The Congress Party should have been able to benefit from this failure to lift millions of our citizens out of poverty. But polls indicate that it is unlikely to. Could it be because the solutions that Congress offers are those same old ones? Scraps off the political high table as charity in the form of freebies. 

What people living in extreme poverty need are the tools to escape poverty: good schools, decent hospitals and jobs. What they do not need is ‘alleviation’ of their poverty. The Congress manifesto indicates that its leaders have not learned this. she writes.