NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday unleashed an unusually sharp attack against the Opposition, saying no matter how many members raise slogans to shout him down, he can singlehandedly handle them all.
“Desh dekh raha hai, ek akela kitno ko bhari padh raha hai (the country is watching how one person has outweighed so many),” he said in his fiery speech during his reply to the debate on the motion of thanks to the President’s address in the Rajya Sabha.
Thumping his chest amid the Opposition’s shouting ‘Modi-Adani, bhai-bhai’, the PM said he lives for the country, which has rattled the Opposition parties so much that they are throwing muck after muck at him to see what sticks.
When Modi was speaking, Opposition members continued to disrupt his speech by raising slogans on the Adani controversy. “Jitna keechad uchaloge, kamal utna hee zyada khilega (the more dirt you throw at the BJP, the bigger the lotus will bloom),” an aggressive Modi said to thunderous applause from his party colleagues.
Training his guns on the Gandhi family, which accused the Centre of ignoring India’s first PM Jawaharlal Nehru’s efforts in nation-building, Modi asked if Nehru was so great, how come his scions don’t use his surname. “Why shy away from using ‘Nehru’ surname?” he taunted the Gandhis.
The PM said while the Congress named 600-odd government schemes after the Nehru-Gandhi family, it never tried to sort out the country’s problems on a permanent basis. “What they preach now in politics has never been practised by them when they were in power for over four decades,” he added.
Modi said the Congress trampled on the rights of states and regional parties by toppling elected governments 90 times by misusing Article 356. Indira Gandhi used it 50 times to dismiss governments, he said, explaining how elected governments of the Left in Kerala, N T Rama Rao in Andhra, Sharad Pawar in Maharashtra and M G Ramachandran in Tamil Nadu were toppled. Mocking the Opposition, he said today these parties are sitting with the Congress, which he said is bothered only about its ambitions and not the welfare of the nation.