(PTI)
In his campaign blitzkrieg in poll-bound Gujarat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday accused the Congress of seeking to divide the people on caste and religious lines. He also hit out at the Congress over the upcoming election of its president, alleging that the opposition party has a history of rigging (organisational) elections. If one doesn’t have democracy in his home (party), how can the person practice it in the country, he wondered and said the outcome of the election to the top post in the Congress is a foregone conclusion. He lashed out at the Congress over its criticism of the government’s ambitious bullet train project, saying if the opposition party has a problem with it, it could roam around on bullock carts. “The people of Gujarat know what the Congress is up to. It changes colour time and again, creates a wall between brothers, it wants to make urban areas fight with rural areas of the country, illiterate fight with literates and poor fight with the rich,” he said.
Modi said the party made “one caste fight with the other, one religion fight with another”. “They keep you busy in fighting with each other. You may die but the Congress will eat ‘malai’ (cream),” he said, launching a broadside against the opposition party apparently for having an alliance with caste leaders such as Hardik Patel, Jignesh Mevani and Alpesh Thakor ahead of the state polls. “But, they do not understand that all these diseases were cured in Gujarat from the day when the BJP came to power in the state, and the state is firmly on the path of development,” the prime minister asserted. “They (Congress) have a pain that Gujarat is progressing rapidly. When I was the chief minister, no day passed when they had not taken a step to harm Gujarat,” he said. Sharpening his attack on Congress leaders such as former prime minister Manmohan Singh and former finance minister P Chidambaram, he told a rally in Bharuch district that by opposing the bullet train, the party stooped to a such a level that it was opposing the country’s development.
