New Delhi: Skits and door-to-door campaigns. That’s how the Aam Aadmi Party plans to turn the tables on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “revdi” culture remark in two poll-bound states — Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh.
The strategy, according to political leaders and experts, seems to be aimed at telling the public that the BJP was against promised free services at a time when rising prices, depleting savings, and unemployment have affected a large number of people. The aim is to ensure that Modi’s “revdi culture remark” — a term the prime minister used to describe freebies offered by political parties — backfires on the BJP, experts say.
A senior Delhi-based AAP functionary told ThePrint: “In our poll campaigns in Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat, our volunteers have now started doing skits on the subject”.
He added: “Some of them dress like train catering staff and act like hawkers yelling ‘revdi, revdi’ and then explain to people what the BJP calls revdi is actually what the AAP means by the quality education and healthcare services for free, 300-unit free electricity, etc and how such welfare measures contribute in increase net disposable savings of households. Our volunteers are also spreading the same message through door-to-door visits.”
Modi’s comments on freebies at this juncture seem to have several aspects, said experts, citing subsidies contributing to the poor condition of states’ finances year after year, fear of regional leaders developing themselves into brands with freebie-centric governance models, and a direct attack on the AAP whose expansion beyond Delhi and Punjab can be a problem for the BJP in the long run.
Kejriwal’s aggressive counter-attack strategy on the matter too seems to have many sides, experts say, explaining how Modi’s comments directly hit his fundamental governance model that relies heavily on subsidies. They also say Kejriwal taking on Modi directly at this point can give him political mileage not only in poll-bound Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh but also in terms of his larger national ambitions in the future.
“The PM’s comments seemed like a veiled attack on Kejriwal and his policies,” Praveen Rai, a political analyst with the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, told ThePrint. “It seems like Kejriwal has taken it as a personal attack. His governance model in Delhi indeed depends heavily on free services. So, the PM’s comments affect the AAP more than anyone else, perhaps.”
