A day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi set the tone for the NDA's belligerence against Congress, especially the Gandhi family, Union ministers M Venkaiah Naidu, Manohar Parrikar, JP Nadda, Prakash Javadekar, Ananth Kumar and Nirmala Sitharaman, among others, hit out at the top Congress brass.
The real reason behind Congress disrupting Parliament was that it wanted to block GST Bill and the country's economic growth, Parrikar charged in Dehradun while Union Minister Rajyavardhan Rathore accused the opposition party of putting the interest of Nehru-Gandhi family before that of the country.
Party spokesperson Nalin Kohli said in Pune that by stalling Parliament over a non-issue like the Lalit Modi row, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi had made himself, and not the GST Bill and other important issues, central to the interests of India.
Taking a dig at Rahul, he said it was a sad state of affairs that senior leaders with greater intelligence than him like Ghulam Nabi Azad and P Chidambaram were forced to defend him.
More press conferences will be held by NDA leaders, including ministers, in the coming days as the ruling alliance seeks to capitalise on the virtual wash-out of Parliament's Monsoon session because it believes that there is a "popular anger" against it.
NDA has also planned to carry out intense campaign in all 44 constituencies of Congress and nine of the Left parties which, it said, were the "principal actors" in the disruption.
At a meeting of NDA MPs, Modi had yesterday asked them to fan out across the country to expose the Congress, equating the disruption with the Emergency, when Congress wanted power to be concentrated in one family.
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