Rediff.com« Back to articlePrint this article

Congress fears it will be out of power if India gets rid of poverty: Modi

November 23, 2013 22:19 IST

Attacking the Congress for ‘doing nothing for poor’, Bharatiya Janata Party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi on Saturday said that the ruling party, over generations never wanted to educate people and eliminate poverty as it was afraid of being stripped of power.

"The Congress knows that the moment masses get educated their chairs will be in danger," Modi said, addressing a poll meeting in Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh on the last day of the campaigning for the November 25 assembly elections.

Targeting Nehru-Gandhi family, he said, "Why four generations of a family are saying the same thing (on poverty) but doing nothing for the people of the country."

Modi alleged that the Congress is "not doing anything for the poor because it knows that if the country gets rid of poverty, they will be out of power."

"Whenever elections come, the Congress keeps chanting in the name of poor. But they will do nothing (to remove it). If poverty goes, so will their chairs," he remarked.

The BJP leader recalled days of emergency and polls held in 1977 and urged "people to fight the elections".

"I can say after touring Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan that people are fighting these elections (this time)," he said.

Praising Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan for removing the BIMARU tag on MP, by launching a series of developmental programmes, Modi said, "I won't talk of Gujarat. There are two governments, one in Madhya Pradesh and other Rajasthan. See the difference in their work and then decide for whom to vote."

Without naming Congress General Secretary Digvijaya Singh, Modi said ten years ago a person had done 'Bantaadhar' (made it worse) of the state, but in the last ten years thing have changed.

Targeting Congress for its "groupism", Modi said an MP of this region (Meenakshi Natarajan) was locked by the warring factions of the party sometime back.

Modi claimed that according to his information the lock was opened only when Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi intervened.

Taking a dig at Digvijaya without taking his name, he said a leader of the party these days is telling him about "decency in politics" but it can be recalled that the same person used inappropriate language for describing a local woman MP sometime ago.

© Copyright 2024 PTI. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of PTI content, including by framing or similar means, is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent.