Amit Shah to Rahul Gandhi: Your Turn Won’t Come for 30 Years

New Delhi, October 22: It is not every day that a minister speaks to an absent opponent, but Amit Shah made a point of it on Thursday. With Rahul Gandhi on a private visit abroad, the Union Home Minister told him from a stage in the capital that the Congress would be out of power for a very long time.

“I know you can’t hear me; you are sitting somewhere abroad,” Shah said, according to reports of the Hindi speech. “Why you are sitting there is your private life. But once you land in Delhi, listen to me: your turn will not come for the next 30 years.”

The occasion

Shah was in Delhi to inaugurate and lay the foundation stones of 43 Delhi Jal Board projects worth Rs 8,941 crore. The event was not a party rally, but he used it to take on the Opposition. He spoke about the Yamuna, saying that the Congress governed Delhi for years and did nothing for the river, and that the honour of cleaning it from Yamunotri to the Sangam would go to the BJP under Narendra Modi.

The “vote theft” rebuttal

The sharpest part of the speech was aimed at the allegation Rahul Gandhi has been pressing for weeks: that votes are being stolen, with the Election Commission and the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls in the dock. Shah said Gandhi was raising the charge to protect the votes of “infiltrators”, an allegation the Congress has not accepted.

He argued that the Congress’s position on the poll body changes with its results: “Where you win, the Election Commission is doing well, but whenever you lose, the Election Commission is deemed faulty.” He also said protests and demonstrations achieve nothing, and told Gandhi to work for the people who elected him.

The numbers Shah cited

To back up his prediction, Shah pointed to the Congress’s record in particular states. According to reports, he said the party had not won an election in West Bengal for 54 years, in Arunachal Pradesh for 12 years and in Delhi for 18 years, and that the trend began long before Modi came to power.

Those claims hold up for the specific states he named. The Congress’s last assembly election win in West Bengal was in 1972, in Arunachal Pradesh in 2014, and in Delhi in 2008. But the picture is not uniform across the country. The party won assembly elections in Himachal Pradesh in 2022 and in Karnataka and Telangana in 2023. A 30-year forecast, in any case, is a political statement and not a measurable one.

A swipe at AAP

In the same speech, Shah turned to Arvind Kejriwal. He warned the AAP national convener that his party would be “rooted out” of Punjab, where it governs and where elections are due in early 2027. The remark suggests the BJP is already looking at the state, and tries to link AAP’s fortunes to the Congress’s.

The trip and the response

Reports say Gandhi is on a four-day private visit to Vietnam. The BJP wasted no time in turning it into a talking point at a moment when the Opposition is running a high-pitched campaign over the voter rolls. Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, asked about the trip, said: “I am not a travel agent.”

I could not find a formal response from the Congress to Shah’s remarks in the reports I reviewed.

The wider backdrop

The speech comes in the middle of a fierce argument. Student-led protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, mass detentions in Delhi, a Supreme Court notice to the Election Commission on the Opposition’s petition and the BJP’s claim that the movement is aimed at “regime change” have all kept the issue at the top of the agenda. Shah’s message was a way to tie these threads together: the BJP’s argument is that the Opposition is blaming institutions for electoral defeats, while the Opposition says the questions about voter deletions are real and unanswered.

Reading the rhetoric

Predictions about decades of power are a familiar tool in Indian politics, meant to energise supporters and demoralise rivals. They also invite a response: voters have changed governments in India before, and often at times when it seemed unlikely. The more practical test comes sooner, in the elections that follow, starting with Punjab.

What to watch

How the Congress replies, and in what tone. What Gandhi says on his return. Whether the Supreme Court’s hearing on the SIR petition changes the debate. And whether the BJP keeps using the “infiltrators” framing in states that go to the polls next.