 "Cong-BJP war of words escalates to a crescendo")
A day after Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi of doing ‘khoon ki dalali’, exploiting the sacrifices of Indian soldiers for politics, the Congress-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) war of words escalated to name calling and digging up the past of their respective party chiefs.
In the midst of the exchange of verbal volleys, BJP chief Amit Shah also laid down a well-thought-out strategy that the party is to follow in the run up to the forthcoming Uttar Pradesh assembly polls.
If on Wednesday the PM purportedly asked his ministerial colleagues to not indulge in chest thumping on surgical strikes lest it creates war hysteria, Shah today put in a caveat.
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He said the BJP will launch a campaign to bolster the morale of the defence forces. The party will take the success of the surgical strikes by the Army to the people, including in Uttar Pradesh. “We have not claimed that we carried out the surgical strikes. The Army did it. The credit is due to the Army, not politicians,” he said.
The BJP President said senior leaders and ministers have not issued any statements that could be construed as politicizing the surgical strikes. He also defended comments by Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar on Thursday in Agra and Lucknow. Parrikar is a Member of Parliament from that state, Shah said.
He said it was quite natural for party’s district and tehsil level leaders to take pride in the Indian Army’s surgical strikes on the Line of Control in Jammu and Kashmir, and their statements should be seen as an outpouring of this sentiment. “I am surprised why they (Congress and others) cannot identify with this sentiment,” Shah said, adding that by questioning the strikes, the Congress has associated itself with the dejection in Pakistan.
Shah singled out Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi and Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal for their comments that he said demoralized the defence forces. He spared other non-Congress regional parties opposition leaders, including Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati, stating they haven’t indulged in irresponsible statements to that an extent.
The BJP President said ‘Kejriwal stands with Pakistan’ was the top tending hashtag in Pakistan on Thursday and termed the Delhi CM as foremost of anti-India politicians who have doubted the Army.
On Gandhi’s comments that BJP and Modi government are indulging in “khoon ki dalali”, Shah said the Congress leader has insulted the bravery of the Indian Army. He said Gandhi has “crossed all limits” and the use of the word “dalali” betrayed Congress mindset, whose leaders were involved in several scams, from Bofors gun purchase deal to coal allocation and 2G spectrum scams.
He said there was something wrong in Gandhi’s “mool”, or origins. Later, Shah clarified that he meant the fault was in his though process. He said the Congress leader’s comments have angered the people and demoralized the forces.
At the concluding public meeting of ‘kisan yatra’ at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on Thursday, Gandhi had said the PM was exploiting the blood that soldiers have spilt for political expediency.
Shah likened Gandhi’s comment to that of Congress President Sonia Gandhi’s in the run up to the 2007 Gujarat assembly polls where she termed Modi a “merchant of death”. He said Modi-led BJP won a two thirds majority in that election. Shah said that in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections Sonia Gandhi accused Modi of doing ‘zeher ki kheti’, sowing “seeds of poison” and BJP won a majority. “Let us see where this ‘khoon ki dalali’ takes the Congress.
The BJP President said that for 10 years the Congress-led UPA governments were negligent about the needs of defence forces. He said three generations of Rahul Gandhi’s family couldn’t fulfill the promise of ‘one rank one pension’ to two million personnel, but the Modi government ensured that over 1.9 million of these retired servicemen get revised pensions.
Later in the day, senior party leader and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad termed Congress spokesperson Kapil Sibal’s remarks on the BJP chief having done time in jail as “shameful, regrettable and full of venom.” He said the CBI had exonerated Shah and termed the case a “frame up”.
Prasad said his party doesn’t want to talk about the cheating case in which the Congress President Sonia Gandhi and Vice President Rahul are on bail, or the kind of skeletons that the Congress has over the last 60 years.
He said Congress leaders were also tearing their hair at Rahul Gandhi’s comments. “In the Congress, devotion to Rahul Gandhi is a priority over devotion to the country. Defending Rahul has become more important than defending the country,” Prasad said. He said Congress would find itself reduced from 44 seats in the Lok Sabha to 24 in the next elections.
