BackCongress launches 2014 election campaign
The advertisement campaign, which was launched on Friday, carries the tagline 'main nahin, hum' (it's not me, it's us)
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New Delhi: The Congress party, which leads the ruling coalition, seems to have shifted its focus for the 2014 election campaign from the aam aadmi (common man) to inclusive power and progress to the people.
The party’s advertisement campaign, which was launched on Friday, carries the tagline main nahin, hum (it’s not me, it’s us).
The commercial takes a cue from Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s 17 January speech at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) meeting, where he spoke against the personality-driven campaign of the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has selected Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate for the general election due by May.
The half-page advertisement in all major newspapers shows Gandhi at the centre flanked by nine people from different communities and prominently features the slogan Har Haath Shakti, Har Haath Tarakki (power in every hand, progress to everyone). Although the party has retained the word hand, its election symbol, it has done away with the phrase aam aadmi from its election slogan.
The Congress, which successfully played up on the common man factor in its 2004 and 2009 national election campaigns, has given up the rhetoric after the strong emergence of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) led by Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal.
Despite resisting the demand for announcing the Gandhi family scion as its prime ministerial candidate, the party’s advertisement clearly indicates that he will be the face of the Congress in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
On Thursday, addressing villagers in his Amethi constituency in Uttar Pradesh, Gandhi said he would take over as prime minister if Congress members of Parliament choose him after his party returns to power.
In a move to counter the campaign of the BJP and the AAP, the Congress advertisement says: “No hand has a magic wand that can be waved to achieve progress. We have to form a great India together. Therefore, the Congress’s aim is to give power to every hand so that everyone gets full opportunity for progress."
In 2004, when the BJP unleashed a public campaign around the theme of India Shining to underline the country’s development under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led government, the Congress came up with the slogan aam aadmi ko kya mila (what did the common man get?). The slogan touched a chord with the rural populace and played a key role in the Congress’s return to power in 2004.
India’s oldest political party continued with the aam aadmi symbolism in 2009. Along with popular moves like the ₹ 60,000 crore farm loan waiver and the rural job guarantee scheme, the Congress coined the slogan Congress ka haath aam aadmi ke saath (Congress’s hand is with the common people). The appeal to rural voters again helped the 128-year-old party to return to power with a greater number of Parliament seats and an impressive coalition majority.
Until last year, the party had indicated that it would continue to use the aam aadmi catchphrase for its election campaign. When it announced the launch of the direct benefit transfer scheme in which subsidies are directly paid into a beneficiary’s bank account, its slogan was aapka paisa, aapke haath (your money in your hand).
The Gandhi scion, who is leading the party’s 2014 campaign, has been saying that the Congress will not focus on any one personality, but will rather bank on the party’s ideology that is rooted in secularism, equality and inclusiveness.
“The Congress party is an idea which lives in the heart of the people. The theme of unity has been there for over 3,000 years," Gandhi said at the AICC meeting. “It can’t be erased and whoever tried to erase it has got erased."
“Democracy is not ruled by diktat. Democracy is not ruled by one man," he had said. “We will not respond by lighting fires of communal hatred and turning people against one another... We don’t respond by proposing that structures of democracy be handed over to one man."
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