Responding to PM Modi’s Independence Day speech, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge reached for a familiar line: accusing the BJP and RSS of spreading hatred and division, he declared that the Congress, by contrast, is “opening a mohabbat ki dukaan” — a shop of love. It is a good soundbite. It is also, at this point, a three-year-old one, first coined by Rahul Gandhi during the 2022-23 Bharat Jodo Yatra and repeated so often since — at party conclaves, election rallies, even internal Haryana leadership meetings — that it now functions less as a fresh political message and more as the Congress’s permanent brand slogan.
An old answer to a new question
The timing of Kharge’s remark is what makes it worth examining. He invoked the phrase specifically in the context of what he called a “hate campaign” against student protesters, at a moment when reports elsewhere describe an emerging “Gen Z vs Gen Z” ideological contest unfolding around this year’s Independence Day. That is a genuinely new and different political terrain than the one “mohabbat ki dukaan” was originally built for — a slogan designed for a walking yatra aimed at social unity is now being deployed to court a generation shaped by exam-fraud protests, gig-economy precarity, and a political culture that moves at social-media speed. Whether a phrase can stretch that far without losing its meaning is a fair question.
The BJP’s obvious counter
The slogan has also, for years now, been an easy target. PM Modi and other BJP leaders have repeatedly thrown it back at the Congress — citing an incident involving an Indian journalist and Rahul Gandhi’s team in the US, or Kharge’s own remark about what might have happened “if Congress had won 20 more seats” — as evidence that the “shop of love” rhetoric doesn’t survive contact with the party’s own conduct. Political attacks always look for this kind of contradiction, but the frequency with which the BJP finds new material to make the charge suggests the slogan has become a liability as much as an asset: familiar enough to be recognisable, worn enough to invite mockery.
What would actually reach Gen-Z
Slogans rarely bridge generational gaps on their own; specific, concrete positions on the issues young voters currently care about do. If the Congress wants “mohabbat ki dukaan” to mean something to a 19-year-old watching exam-fraud protests unfold, the test isn’t whether Kharge repeats the phrase convincingly — it’s whether the party backs it with policy specifics young voters can actually point to.
— Daily Archives Editorial Desk