Union Textiles Minister Smriti Irani said in Kodagu on Sunday that the parliamentary elections were not about the re-election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but about making a choice for the country’s development.
Addressing a rally at Gonikoppal, Ms. Irani said Mr. Modi had achieved in five years what the Congress could not in 55. The BJP leader said that the people of the country were deprived of the fruits of development while Congress leaders, including the Gandhi-Vadra family, prospered under the Congress rule.
Referring to the Jan Dhan Yojana, she said there were critics who had slammed the BJP and the PM when he announced that government subsidies would be directly transferred to individual bank accounts, lest they be siphoned off by middlemen. The critics said the poor did not have access to bank accounts, said Ms. Irani, adding that that had been the legacy of 55 years of Congress rule.
“There were eight crore fraudulent bank accounts detected and closed as they were siphoning off taxpayers’ money from the government’s treasury. In Karnataka alone, 1.4 crore bank accounts were opened while 30 crore people for the first time had subsidy coming into their accounts across the country,” she said.
Corruption and Congress
The Minister also said the Congress was synonymous with corruption. Without naming the late Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, she said that “a prominent Congress leader” had stated that out of every single rupee released for the poor from Delhi, only 10 paisa reached the beneficiary. “What the Congress did not spell out was where the remaining 90 paisa went, but people of the country know better about who benefited.”
She listed a slew of programmes launched by the NDA government and said that under the Ujjwala scheme, LPG cylinders were distributed to seven crore poor families in the country, including 28 lakh from Karnataka. She said the scheme had helped end the scourge of smoke-filled kitchens in rural areas which had affected the health of the women in the countryside.
“Contrast this with personal enrichment of Congress leaders even as the people of the country were left behind and deprived of the benefits and fruits of development during the 55 years of [Congress] rule,” Ms. Irani said.
The BJP leader invoked the martial traditions prevalent in Kodagu and said that the people of the region sacrifice their life for safeguarding the country, but they would never have imagined that a day would come when a Congress leader would dub the Chief of Army Staff a “goonda” or seek proof for retaliatory action and “belittle their sacrifices”.
Also launching a broadside at the coalition government in the State, Ms. Irani said people have seen the spectacle of the coalition partners fighting it out in the open over petty issues and then closing ranks and coming together when there were Income Tax raids on corrupt contractors.