In his first full-length interview this bitter poll season, BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi on Wednesday tried to clear the air on a number of issues. It appeared as though he was attempting to persuade the floating voters to trust him and dissuade his critics of the idea that he may be vindictive in power.
At his candid best as yet, the man who’s not known to take questions easily especially from the media, answered quite a few raised on a range of issues — from Gujarat riots to his friendly relations with Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa — and that he won’t launch a witch-hunt against Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra.
Dangling a promise of a post-poll alliance, Modi suggestively said, there are no “untouchables’ in politics. “We (AIADMK and BJP) might have different ideologies, but at a personal level, I have excellent relations with J Jayalalithaa,” he claimed.
These are, of course, indications from Modi himself of what the future holds after May 16, in case the BJP, led by him, gets to form the government at the Centre.
The Gujarat Chief Minister denied that he has remained ‘silent’ on the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat. “I answered every top journalist in the country from 2002 to 2007, but noticed there was no exercise to understand the truth,” Modi told Smita Prakash, Editor (News), ANI, in an exclusive interview. He alleged that unknown entities gave rise to conspiracy theories linking him to the tragedy.