Use political restraint, Sonia tells Congress

Congress president Sonia Gandhi today ordered her party spokespersons to maintain “political restraint” while attacking the Opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Worried that targeting personalities like Varun Gandhi may be counter-productive, Sonia is learnt to have asked her colleagues to focus more on issues and not on specific people.

According to sources, the Congress chief today called her party’s senior spokespersons — Kapil Sibal, Jayanthi Natarajan and Ashwini Kumar — at her office and explained the new strategy. Gandhi wants her party to concentrate more on the positive aspects of the campaign as it has decided to fight the elections and seek the mandate on the basis of the UPA government’s performance during the past few years.

But for the past few days, the Congress spokespersons have been harping on the Varun Gandhi issue as an effort to highlight it as an example of the “communal face” of the arch-rival BJP. But now, the Congress think-tank have realised that too much talks about the “BJP’s Gandhi” might become a wrong political move and instead help the BJP gain some quick publicity. “The entire Varun Gandhi episode was a desperate ploy of the BJP to gain some momentum. We should not fall in the trap,” said a senior general secretary of the party.

The top Congress leadership has decided not to attack even its estranged allies like Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief Lalu Prasad or Samajwadi Party supremo Mulayam Singh Yadav in the run-up to the polls.