Amit Shah attacks Rahul over his meeting with Lalu

BJP president Amit Shah today attacked Congress chief Rahul Gandhi over his meeting with Rashtriya Janata Dal supremo Lalu Prasad, who is convicted in fodder scam cases, saying it has highlighted his two faces and that a party with such double standards cannot give a clean government in Karnataka.

Addressing a rally in Kolar in poll-bound Karnataka, Shah recalled that Gandhi had publicly torn an ordinance the then UPA government in 2013 had brought to save Lalu Prasad, a Congress ally, but now his meeting with the Bihar leader showed that he was a supporter of corruption.

Gandhi today went to AIIMS, Delhi to meet Prasad before he was discharged. Prasad was undergoing treatment at the premier hospital for a host of ailments for nearly a month.

Now 2019 (Lok Sabha) elections are approaching. The Congress is afraid that it cannot win without Lalu Prasad's support. He has been convicted in the fodder scam. The same Rahul Gandhi who had torn the ordinance goes to meet him and hugs him so that they could form a government. This has highlighted to people two faces of Rahul Gandhi, he said.

Gandhi has one set of standards when in power and now to get power he does not shy away from hugging Lalu Prasad, Shah said, targeting the Congress president.

A party with such double standards cannot give a clean government in Karnataka When the president of a party is a supporter of corruption, the this is how its government is run, the BJP chief said, attacking the Siddaramaiah government in the state.

In a major embarrassment for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his cabinet colleagues in 2013, Gandhi, who was the then Congress vice president, chose to publicly castigate the UPA government for issuing an ordinance to negate the Supreme Court order on disqualifying convicted MPs and MLAs, terming it as "complete nonsense" that should be "torn and thrown out".