Modi’s friendship with Trump hurt India, says Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge

BEngaluru: u.s. Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge on sun said undercoat government minister Narendra Modi’s friendly relationship with US President Donald Trump has caused damage to India, saying the alliance had left the country weaker abroad and divided at home.“Trump and Modi can be friends, but Modi has become an enemy of the nation. He spoiled the atmosphere… Trump imposed a huge tariff. After a 50% tariff, he destroyed our people,” Kharge told reporters. “The nation comes first and your friendship is secondary.”He argued that Modi had departed from India’s long-standing tradition of neutrality in foreign policy. “Modi needs to realise that India has a foreign policy rooted in neutrality for decades, and it should continue on that path,” Kharge said.The Congress chief went further, linking the fallout from Trump’s trade measures to India’s more recent recalibration with Beijing. Referring to Modi’s earlier claim that no Chinese troops had entered Indian territory during border tensions, Kharge remarked, “Now Modi himself entered there in China.”Domestic economic policy also came under scrutiny. Kharge said the government’s decision to revise the Goods and Services Tax (GST) slabs was both overdue and politically motivated. “We raised this issue eight years ago. We said that if there were two slabs, that would benefit poor people, but they introduced four to five slabs and looted people. After the elections approached, they found some difficulties and revised the GST slabs,” he said. Still, he noted that the Congress would welcome “any step that benefits the poor.”Turning to Bihar, where elections are due, Kharge outlined the issues his party intends to highlight. “Unemployment, law and order, sexual assault on women… Dalits and backward classes are not getting scholarships, and farmers are not getting fertilisers. ‘Vote theft’ issue is also our main agenda,” he said.The theme of “vote theft” surfaced earlier in the day when Kharge, in a post on X, accused the Election Commission of India (ECI) of “stonewalling crucial information” in a case tied to alleged voter deletions in Karnataka. He pointed to a report that the investigation had gone cold because key records had not been shared with authorities.“Understand the chronology. Ahead of the May 2023 Karnataka elections, Congress had exposed a massive deletion of voters in the Aland Constituency. Thousands of voters were stripped of their rights through a very sophisticated operation of forging Form 7 applications,” Kharge wrote.He recalled that in February 2023, a case was registered and investigators uncovered 5,994 forged applications. “Clear evidence of a massive attempt at voter fraud,” Kharge said, adding that the Congress government then ordered a CID probe to identify those behind it.According to him, the investigation has since been stalled. “While ECI had earlier shared part of the documents needed to trace the forgery, it has now stonewalled the crucial information -- effectively shielding those behind the Vote Chori!” he said.Kharge pressed the commission with pointed questions: “Why has ECI suddenly blocked vital evidence? Who is it protecting? BJP’s Vote Chori department? Is ECI bending under the BJP’s pressure to derail the CID probe?”The Election Commission has previously dismissed such allegations from the Congress as baseless. There was no immediate response from EC to Kharge’s latest claims.The Aland seat at the heart of the controversy was won by Congress candidate Bhojaraj in 2023, who defeated BJP’s Subhash Guttedar by nearly 10,000 votes. But for Kharge, the issue was less about the result and more about what he portrayed as an attempt to strip citizens of their fundamental right to vote. “Individual’s right to vote needs to be protected,” he said, adding that Indian democracy itself required safeguarding.