Soon after three Congress MPs said Prime Minister Narendra Modi should not be demonised, party leader Kapil Sibal on Saturday wondered if any Bharatiya Janata Party leader had stood up to tell Modi the same about his criticism of the Opposition.

“Which BJP leader has stood up and publicly advised the Prime Minister and his party to stop demonising the Opposition and its leaders?” Sibal tweeted.

On Thursday, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh had said demonising Modi all the time would not help the Opposition’s cause. “Unless we recognise that he is doing things which people recognise and which have not been done in the past, we are not going to be able to confront this guy,” he was quoted as saying at a book launch.

The former Union minister had also said that it was due to Modi’s activities between 2014 and 2019 that more than 30% of the electorate voted for the Bharatiya Janata Party in the Lok Sabha elections this year. Ramesh said the Pradhan Mantri Ujjwala Yojana had been successful.

A day later, senior Congress leaders Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Shashi Tharoor backed Ramesh’s comments.

“Always said demonising Modi was wrong. Not only is he PM of nation, a one-way opposition actually helps him,” Singhvi said. “Acts are always good, bad and indifferent – they must be judged issue-wise and not person-wise. Certainly, Ujjwala scheme is only one amongst other good deeds.”

Tharoor claimed he had argued for six years that Modi should be praised whenever he says or does the right thing, thereby adding credibility to the Opposition’s criticisms whenever he errs. “I welcome others in Opposition coming around to a view for which I was excoriated at the time,” PTI quoted the Thiruvananthapuram MP as saying.

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