NEW DELHI: Congress party’s untested but widely admired leader Priyanka Gandhi said on Tuesday she was hurt by the opposition’s accusations of alleged corruption against her businessman husband Robert Vadra.

Most opposition parties have demanded a detailed investigation into Mr Vadra’s reported land deals in Haryana that are said to have raked in a fortune for him. Ms. Gandhi is campaigning in Rae Bareli for her mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi.

While not a candidate herself she is on the best of terms with her brother Rahul Gandhi who is fighting a tough election in neighbouring Amethi.

“When you watch TV, what do you see? Harsh words ridiculing my family. A lot of things are said about my husband. I feel pained. I feel pained, not for myself, not because somebody is ridiculing and the truth is not being told, not because everyday I tell my children that the truth will prevail. I feel pained at the kind of politics that has come to the fore in these elections,” Priyanka Gandhi was quoted by Press Trust of India as telling a gathering in Rae Bareli.

“I am pained that while this election should have been contested on development, needs of the people, employment for youth, instead, an attempt is being made to mislead you towards meaningless talk,” she said.

Later, she told reporters: “There has been a political attack on my family.

They have used my husband for political attack. It has been going on for two years and I feel very strongly about it.”

The anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has put up one of its top leaders, TV star Kumar Vishwas, to take on Rahul Gandhi in Amethi. It was AAP that put a hard focus on the corruption it accuses Mr Vadra of indulging in.

But the Bhartiya Janata Party has been just as critical of Priyanka’s husband.

“Do you want a country of the Buddha, of Mahatma Gandhi where Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians live together or a country where you fight one another and one community is taken forward while another is left behind and division is created in terms of caste and religion,” she asked those present at the public meeting.

Putting intensive focus on the family’s victimhood to the exclusion of other more serious issues of national importance is seen as a feature of the siblings -- Jawaharlal Nehru’s great grandchildren. The family is thus perceived as being tardy in responding to the threats from communalism, for example, during the Sikh massacres in 1984, and later, in the anti-Muslim pogroms of Gujarat in 2002.

On the contrary, the BJP whose prime ministerial candidate has emerged as a serious threat to India’s secular democracy, was seen by Rahul Gandhi as a joke.

“They are a joke,” Mr. Gandhi had exulted in comments after the 2004 elections. “The BJP has always abused my family. They were hostile to my grandmother, and to my father.”

That’s how he saw the BJP – a nuisance for the family. In a subsequent election, Mr. Gandhi proclaimed apropos of no extant threat, not even an issue, that his grand mother – Mrs. Indira Gandhi – had broken Pakistan into two. The timing of the comments puzzled his own party colleagues as they were not going to fetch him two extra votes in the Uttar Pradesh elections for which he was campaigning.

In India’s free-for-all style political campaigns, hate speeches are passé and personal attacks are a norm. Though this may not be the most desirable feature of the multi-faceted democracy, seeking sympathy for her husband was not being seen as helpful for Priyanka Gandhi to tone down the attacks on her husband or to get him absolved of the clutch of accusations he faces. Victimhood may fetch a few extra votes, if at all, but there would be a cost.

Observers say Ms Gandhi would need to decide if the family victimhood card would fetch her useful electoral gain or would it rather dent her image as the abler of the two siblings who could better project her party as a cohesive national force, and not merely a family heirloom.