Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, who addressed his first public rally here on Sunday since taking over as the BJP’s campaign chief, not only flayed the Congress for playing vote-bank politics but also tried to woo the Muslim community by asking the Kashmiri youth to abjure the path of violence and join the social mainstream.
Addressing the ‘Sankalp’ rally here on the occasion of the 60th death anniversary of Jan Sangh founder and BJP ideologue Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, he said the issues in Kashmir could not be resolved at gunpoint.
“We have to take forward the legacy of former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee in Kashmir since he had played a larger role and assuaged the feelings of the average Kashmiris. If the NDA had formed the government (at the Centre) in 2004, the Kashmir issue would have been resolved.
“(The)Kashmiri Pandits would have got justice. Youth of the state would have been employed and the state would have seen development. Now (we) see 300 Kashmiri girls studying at Kota. We have lot of hope from the youths in the progress and development of the country as they constitute the majority population as 65 per cent of the country’s population is below the age of 35,” said Modi.
He urged the Kashmiri youth to join the BJP for the progress of the country as it will help their families too.
He said,”The BJP is in favour of joint development of Kashmir, J&K to end the dissimilarities among the people of these regions. Our dream must be a Congress free India.”
According to Modi,”the Congress-led UPA had even failed to provide security to the common man as the foreign powers were bent on breaking up the country. Till date, those who air-dropped weapons in Purulia have not been arrested. Besides, the Supreme Court had to intervene to bring back the two Italians (marines) who killed fishermen off the Kerala coast. The country is continuously in crisis due to the UPA’s failure.”
Taking a dig at the UPA-II,he said, “the country is being controlled by two ‘bosses’ and it has become difficult to identify who is (actually)running the country,” without explicitly naming Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress supremo Sonia Gandhi.
He further said,”It must be our dream to rid the country of these two ‘bosses’.”
Modi also asked the Prime Minister what the Centre had done in the wake of Indian national Sarabjeet Singh’s murder in a Pakistan jail and the killing of the two Indian soldiers along the LoC. He said that the youth of the country wanted education and employment. Moreover, they were keen to participate in the country’s progress and development.
Modi, who visited flood-ravaged Uttarakhand on Saturday, said he was saddened by the plight of the victims of the natural calamity. “I felt the grief after listening to painful tales of the survivors (in Uttrakhand).It has been ravaged by the floods,” he said, adding the people of this country were behind those who had been affected by the natural calamity.
He also took a dig at the TV campaign run by the UPA, which highlighted its flagship ‘Bharat Nirman’ programme. “Their line was ‘Bharat Ke Nirman Mein Haq hein Mera’, but after I said ‘Bharat Ke Nirman Mein Shaq hein Mera’, the campaign was abruptly stopped and is not seen on TV anymore,” he said. He also took potshots on the rupee witnessing a fall, saying “both the rupee and the Congress were competing with each other (in going down)”.