The line fell on Sunday afternoon at the Exhibition Grounds in Nampally where the ruling party at the Centre had assembled its booth-level workers ahead of municipal elections in Greater Hyderabad. The country cannot have a party like Congress with such a mindset,” the BJP national president had told the audience, adding that the Congress “always thinks like Italians”. What was once a mere applause line was by Monday morning turned into a party position, as the BJP's central spokesman told reporters in New Delhi that Congress was "acting at the behest of foreign powers to divide and weaken India. One spokesman went one step further and said the letters INC were no longer the Indian National Congress, but were hostile to the nation.

Stripped of the theatre, the charge is not new. The taunt referring to an "Italian" mind goes back to the origin of the Congress's long-time chief, and it has been transformed by the right for the better part of three decades. It is important to point out this time is how quickly the escalation is occurring and at what point in time it is coming. Within 24 hours, a booth meeting in a South Indian city, where the BJP is still the third force behind the Congress government and the regional Bharat Rashtra Samithi, turned into a national topic of loyalty and treachery. That was more about the Congress than anything and was an indication of how the BJP plans to confront the impending Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation battle and, in the larger picture, the forthcoming 2028 State elections it claims it can win as it has demonstrated in West Bengal.

The matter of the slur, if it's anything, relies on a well-known collection of accusations. The party has been working on a ‘compromised story' of the Nehru-Gandhi family, from the Bofors arms scandal of the 1980s and the extended flight of the businessman accused in this scandal, to the recent allegations about the present Congress leader's meeting with his foreign counterpart who is critical of the Indian government and his dealings with the finance groups the BJP does not like, to his comments on foreign soil about the economy, the armed forces and the military operation against Pakistan, code-named by the government for a married woman's vermilion. Those are political charges and not findings, and Congress considers them such.

But the opposition's response, made a day before, in Nalgonda by the chief minister of Telangana, avoided the nationality jibe and went straight for the language of governance. He challenged BJP and BRS to hold a straight debate on the records and their manifestos, and offered to call a special session of the state legislature for that purpose, and requested them to put it in writing to the presiding officers. He then went on detailing the government's agenda he expects the people to evaluate: lakhs of new ration cards, fine rice for more than three crore people at a cost of Rs. 16,000 crore annually, houses constructed for the poor, support for farmers, loan waiver, and a controversial plan to clean the Musi river, which flows through the capital. It was a conscious decision of topography. Passports are not as argument-proof as rice and houses.

The rhetoric jars with the record of the very government that is now touting it. Its state unit describes the Congress as a stalking horse of Rome; New Delhi has been courting Rome for the last two years more closely than is in any one's memory. The relationship was at an all-time low after the shooting of two Indian fishermen by Italian marines off Kerala in 2012, but was rebuilt and upgraded last month to a "special strategic partnership" by the two governments. The Indian prime minister and his Italian counterpart, who has visited India multiple times and was the chief guest at India's flagship strategic conference, have signed off on a defence industrial roadmap, an agreement on critical minerals, an agreement to deploy Indian nurses to hospitals in Italy and joint research and development on artificial intelligence, space and clean energy. The Italy has joined the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, which India would like to divert trade between Asia and Europe.

The diplomacy is the same as the numbers. Two-way trade in 2025 was worth 14.25 billion euros, and it is in India's favour, with Indian exports of 8.55 billion euros and imports of 5.70 billion euros. The two sides have set themselves a target of 20 billion euros by 2029. Italy is now India's fourth biggest trading partner within the European Union and also India is a priority market in Italy's export strategy. Over 800 Italian companies are active in India with a workforce of approximately 60,000 people, whilst the largest community of Indians living and working in the EU is located in Italy. Tata Motors' multi-billion-euro acquisition of Iveco truck business is the largest Indian gamble in Italy so far. The same government which is suspicious of Italian-ness in a Hyderabad election is also courting Italian capital, Italian factories and Italian votes in Brussels facing trade talks. Either the slur or the statecraft must be insincere.

This is nothing special to India. Branding a domestic competitor as the local agent of foreign money is one of the most frequently used devices in the global populist toolkit, from the U.S. to Hungary to Brazil, and the fact that a specific Hungarian-American financier has been making appearances in these narratives is no accident. It works because it is cheap, sticky as well as because it moves a spat about school, jobs and water onto a safer ground of belonging where the other side is always on the back foot. The price is that it displaces the argument that the chief minister should be having.

This is the reason why this argument is more significant in Telangana than what the nationality theatre portrays as the argument is not emotional but economic. At present, the state accounts for nearly five per cent of the country's total GDP and output is at around 17.8 lakh crore rupees, or nearly 209 billion dollars, with growth rate almost eleven per cent. Per capita income has reached four lakh rupees, which is almost double the national average. Today, nearly a fifth of India's global capability centres are located in Hyderabad and the economic activity of the metropolitan region has surpassed the equivalent of a hundred billion dollars, making it one of the largest urban economies in India. The State has an IT exports of more than Rs. 3 lakh crore and employs over 9 lakh people in the sector; the pharmaceutical plants in the State contribute about 50% in bulk drug exports in India. The Centre, on its part, emphasizes that it had contributed in this story with the civil aviation research centre, Secunderabad station upgrade, a new rail line, a new batch of Vande Bharat coaches from the Kazipet factory and a facility for maintenance of aero-engines opened by a French firm in the city.

That's what the guys at the booth were gathered around to win, and why the weapon was chosen. Until it is able to "out-deliver" the Congress in welfare or "out-organise" on the ground, the BJP can attempt to change the subject. The speeches thus moved beyond development to identity, pitting the "Italian" line against older grievances: the Congress failure to hold the previous BRS government accountable for looting the Kaleshwaram irrigation project, which the Congress could have done as the luring of the late prime minister from Telangana away from the dynasty was a long-standing grievance, and the Congress's supposed failure to punish the BRS government for it. All of these are more focused and local arguments than the question of where a long-dead grandmother of a family was born. The party appears to understand this, hence the heavy reliance of the foreign-hand framing in the headlines and the bread-and-butter framing in the rest of the stump speech.

The issue for the voters of 'Bhagyanagar', as BJP calls Hyderabad, is neither as romantic as 'nation' or as dramatic as a house, but just as integral as the cleanliness of the Musi, and which government can truly keep the foreign firms and their remuneration flowing. The "Italian" jibe will play out in social media and rebuttals it's meant to elicit. However, it is not an easy fit in a country that has developed a self-confident stance on the world, and believes that India is now strong enough and self-assured to deal with all, including Rome. For a nation that is currently occupied with making Italy one of its nearest bridges to Europe, it is hardly too much to fear the ghost of the foreign mother-in-law. The contradiction is the story and it's unlikely this year that the politics of belonging will not intersect with the economics of partnership.