File photo: Congress leader Ambika Soni
Senior Congress leader Ambika Soni has described Prime Minister Narendra Modi as a "communicator who has changed the agenda" to avoid delivering on the promises he made in the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls. (
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"Mr Modi is a communicator; he plays with words, that's one of his strong points. You saw that from the ramparts of the Red Fort, he changed the agenda. He didn't talk of high prices becoming higher. He talked about girls and boys and how parents should talk strongly to their sons but he didn't talk about the number of cases, where a girl's dignity has been violated, which has gone up," said Ms Soni. (
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Like other leaders of her party, Ms Soni too accused the Modi-led government of following UPA's policies. But the former Information and Broadcasting minister on the UPA government admitted that the Congress could not match the BJP-led NDA's campaign strategy.
"We were not as successful in communicating our achievements as we should have. We realised that during our Lok Sabha campaign. We realise that today much more when we see them using our schemes, changing their names and making different types of allocation and counting it as their own achievement. Our Vice President certainly travels a lot and if you were to count his flying hours, he would out beat anybody," said Ms Soni.
When asked why the party's top leaders, like vice president Rahul Gandhi, didn't communicate more effectively, Ms Soni came to Mr Gandhi's defense.
"We have a different way of communicating. It is not necessary that one has to speak only in Parliament. They (Congress leaders) speak in rallies and when they travel to different parts of the country," she said.
She, however, admitted that the party needs an image makeover. "We are in the Opposition. So we must have faltered somewhere. There is going to be image buildup and fight back."
Clearly, the fight-back for the Congress begins in Haryana and Maharashtra next month when the two states, where the party has been in power for a decade or more, go to polls.