Congress has run away from Pradesh electoral battle: Prime Minister Narendra Modi

UNA: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday hit out at the Congress, saying it had “run away” from the Himachal Pradesh electoral battle, which he described as a contest being fought by the people of the state. Campaigning for the third day in a row in the state that goes to the polls on November 9, he said the election was not being fought by his party, the BJP, but the people of the state who were out to “teach” a lesson to the Congress for corruption and poor law and order.

Attacking the Congress on the issue of corruption, Modi accused the previous Congress-led government at the Centre of abusing subsidies worth Rs 57,000 crore. He claimed he had stopped this misuse, and the money was now being used for the welfare of the poor. The people of the state, he said, had decided to teach a lesson to Congress’s “Sultanate”.

He also took a dig at former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi for his statement that out of one rupee spent from Delhi, only 15 paisa reached the villages, saying that Gandhi was merely painting a picture of what the Congress did when it ran the country. Gandhi, he added, was a doctor who diagnosed the problem of corruption but did nothing about it. Modi wondered where the 85 paise went. “Who was that magician? Or which ‘panja’ (palm) was used to steal that money,” he asked, in an apparent reference to the Congress’s electoral symbol, the palm.