Monday’s political slugfest was, literally, over power (shakti in Hindi, which is also, when capitalised, the name of the Hindu mother goddess), with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s seemingly clumsy wording of the “shakti” they were fighting evoking a strong reaction from the Bharatiya Janata Party — Prime Minister Narendra Modi dwelt on it at length in a rally in Telangana, prompting a clarification from Gandhi.

Gandhi’s comments, made on Sunday in Mumbai during the culmination of the Bharat Jodi Nyay Yatra, were already doing the rounds of social media when Modi lashed out at them in the morning. He said the word represented “Bharat Mata” (Mother India, the personification of the country), and that he was ready to embrace the challenge “prevent the eradication of Shakti”.

Modi said the manifesto of the INDIA bloc of opposition parties “targets Shakti, representing every mother, daughter, and sister. I revere them as Shakti and worship Bharat Mata. Their aim to eradicate Shakti is a challenge I embrace. I am ready for the battle ahead. How can anyone on this Earth talk of destroying Shakti when everyone worships it?”

On Sunday, speaking on the completion of his 62-day east-to-west peregrination that began in Manipur, Gandhi said: “In the Hindu religion, there is a word called shakti. We are fighting shakti…We are fighting against a shakti. The question is, what is that shakti? Like someone here said, the king’s soul is in the EVMs. That is right. The king’s soul is in the EVM, is inside every institution in India, is inside the ED, CBI, the Income Tax department.”

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He was referring to electronic voting machines (EVMs), the constant target of some opposition parties that believe process, not politics, is responsible for their defeats. The Opposition has also alleged, not entirely without basis, that federal agencies such as the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and the Enforcement Directorate (ED) have targeted opposition leaders.

But Gandhi’s tortuous phrasing evoked a predictable response.

“Can someone talk about the destruction of ‘Shakti,” Modi asked in Jagtial, Telangana. “ We dedicated the success of the Chandrayaan mission by naming the point where Chandrayaan landed as ‘Shiv Shakti.’ The fight is between those who want to destroy ‘Shakti’ and those who worship ‘Shakti.’ The verdict will be out on June 4.”

The national elections start on April 19, and results will be declared on June 4. Telangana goes to polls on May 13.

For good measure, Modi also referred to Gandhi’s comments during an afternoon rally in Karnataka’s Shivamogga, and said such comments from Mumbai would have hurt the soul of Balasaheb Thackeray. “The blessings of nari shakti (women power) is my biggest shield… and the people of the INDI alliance was to destroy this shakti. They hate the increasing shakti of Ma Bharati.”

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The late Thackeray’s Shiv Sena was a long-standing ally of the BJP, but the two parties fell out in 2019, after the state elections and the Sena allied with the Nationalist Congress Party and the Congress to form the MVA government in Maharashtra. In 2022, the party split, with one faction, now recognised as the Shiv Sena, allying with the BJP and forming the government in the state. The other faction, led by Thackeray’s son Uddhav Thackeray, is now called the Shiv Sena (UBT) and remains part of the INDIA bloc.

Modi’s attack forced Gandhi to clarify his comments on Monday afternoon, and he said the PM was trying to spin his remarks, and that the BJP’s shakti was not religious at all, but a shakti of “immorality, corruption and lies”. “Modi ji does not like what I say, and some way or another attempts to misconstrue and spin a different meaning because he knows what I have said is a deep truth. The shakti that I spoke of, the shakti that we are fighting against, the face of that shakti is Modi ji,” Gandhi wrote on X.

Gandhi said that this shakti had captured free voices in India, as well as its institutions.

On Sunday, Gandhi claimed that the “shakti” forced exits from the opposition alliance, and said that there was a senior Maharashtra leader who admitted to his mother, former Congress president Sonia Gandhi, that he was powerless in the face of pressure. “… Crying in front of my mother, he said, ‘Sonia ji, I am ashamed. I don’t have the courage to fight these people and this shakti. I do not want to go to jail’. This is not just one. There are thousands of people like this that have been made afraid. Do you think that people from the Shiv Sena, Nationalist Congress party left just like that? The shakti I am talking about, they caught them by the throat, and moved them towards the BJP,” Gandhi said.

With speculation that he was that leader, on Monday, former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan, who quit the Congress to join the BJP in February, rushed to clarify his position and said he did not meet Sonia Gandhi before his resignation.

In Telangana, Modi also attacked both the Congress, which is now in power in the state, and the BRS, which preceded it, on issues of corruption. “The Congress has come to power and is eyeing Telangana as its own ATM. The money looted from Telangana reaches Delhi, ending up in the coffers of dynastic families. Then, this money is used to fund the conspiracies of lies and division within the country,” he said.

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“Before coming to power, the Congress attacked the BRS on various scams, but now, it has gone silent. It is not conducting any inquiry into these scams, including that of the Kaleshwaram project. People have realised that one corrupt party cannot fight against another corrupt party,” he added.

Modi referred to the arrest of BRS leader K Kavitha, former chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao’s daughter, in the alleged Delhi excise policy scam last week, and said that “family-based parties” were looting the country. “Take any scam in this country, only these parties are behind them. The DMK is behind the 2G spectrum scam; the Congress is behind the National Herald scam. Now the BRS has joined these family-based parties by resorting to a massive scam in the Kaleshwaram project. Even in the Delhi liquor policy scam, the family members of the BRS leaders have been caught.”

BRS spokesperson Ravula Sridhar Reddy took strong exception to the Prime Minister’s comments that the state was deprived of development during 10 years of KCR’s rule.

He recalled that during the inauguration of Mission Bhagiratha (supply of drinking water to every household) scheme, Modi was all praise for the former chief minister. “Several times, Modi went on record hailing the rapid development in Telangana during the BRS regime,” he said.

On the allegations of corruption by the BRS leaders, Reddy wanted to know why Modi’s party was luring the BRS leaders into his party and fielding them in the parliamentary polls if they had looted the state.

Senior Congress lawmaker and former minister T Jeevan Reddy, who hails from Jagitial district, said the Prime Minister had uttered blatant lies at the public meeting. “He was playing to the galleries. While he claimed that the Centre had launched several projects in Telangana, he did not speak about the delay in the establishment of the turmeric board and closure of the Nizam Sugar Factory. The BJP MPs have done little to Telangana in the last five years,” he alleged.