BJP supporters have often treated Rahul Gandhi as a source of amusement and subject of thousands of memes and jokes, but BJP Rajya Sabha MP from Karnataka Rajeev Chandrasekhar believes that Rahul Gandhi is not some clown, but a man who’s playing and orchestrating a very dangerous game.

“I never considered him a clown. I never describe political opponents that way. I describe them as either being good for the country or being terribly bad for the country. And I consider this gentleman and his whole ecosystem and political strategy as being deeply dangerous and divisive and built on a house of cards of lies and fake everything. A clown implies that you provide joy and happiness to young children, and I assure that is not what comes to mind when I think about Rahul Gandhi,” he explained.

Referring to Congress’s strategy of basing their entire campaign on divisive and sectarian issues like separate religion for Lingayats, north-south divide, one caste against another, Chandrasekhar said that all these were attempts to hide the failures of the state government.

“This elections is about his performance as a CM and his government’s performance in these 5 years. The corruption and the large number of people of his own party and government that have been caught with undisclosed income post demonetisation. There are many relevant questions that will be posed,” he said.

“It is given that they are trying to make this election about everything but their own performance. They have brought the flag in, the Kannada pride, Nava Karnataka Nirmana, they have brought in Rahul Gandhi’s visit talking about Banking scam and every other issue except the most important issue that the voters in Karnataka want to know, that is about the performance of the Siddaramaiah – Rahul Gandhi government. And these are the questions that will get amped up and more visible. These questions cannot be ducked by the duo in the coming weeks,” he added.

The BJP leader said that the party will not let Congress get away with its agenda and keep asking about Siddaramaiah government’s failures.

“Whether you are a voter from any district of Karnataka, whether it is farmer distress, water shortage, corruption, dividing the Lingayat community, dividing people on the basis of faith and religion, there are many questions that Siddaramaiah will have to answer and every effort of his to duck that and make this about something else will be defeated. And I can assure you on the behalf of the people of Karnataka, that they will not succeed,” he told OpIndia.com in an exclusive interview.

Referring to Rahul Gandhi’s midnight candle march in wake of Unnao and Kathua rapes, Chandrasekhar said that the Congress President should first ask Siddaramaiah to ensure children are safe in Karnataka.

“I would have preferred the candlelight vigil to be about when are we arresting these people, what will the punishment be, what kind of amendments are required so we never have this again,” he said, adding that “The Congress government during the UPA commissioned a study about child sexual abuse and found in their own study that up to 40% Indian children were vulnerable to abuse. And they did nothing. The Karnataka government, for example, has done precisely zero.”

He also narrated a 2014 incident where a couple had approached Chandrasekhar for help after their child was molested in Bengaluru school. He spoke about how the then Karnataka Home Minister has retorted saying, “Who asked the mother to work? Who asked them to send their child to school?”

The Rajya Sabha MP further said that what Congress is trying to do in Karnataka ahead of the 2018 assembly election is similar to what the party did at the national level in the run-up to the 2014 general election. The party is trying to hide its failures and scams and instead is busy trying to scare people about BJP and Narendra Modi, he explained.

He though conceded that for 2018 Karnataka assembly election, Congress has the added advantage and tool of using the social media, where the party was not so strong during the 2014 general election. However, he said that all the bots or tools by likes of Cambridge Analytica won’t be able to save Congress from an impending defeat in the state.