Attacking Congress leader Salman Khurshid for doubting the genuineness of crowd during the Prime Minister’s visits abroad, Union Minister Arun Jaitley on Monday said his “plight was understandable” as Narendra Modi had a larger audience in Sydney than his leader got in India.
“Salman Khurshid has made a fascinating claim. He says that there were no people to meet him when he visited Myanmar and that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been exporting groups from India to all foreign destinations wherever he visits. If UPA leaders, during their days in Government, left the expatriate Indian population underwhelmed, is it to be presumed that this should be true for othersIJ” Jaitley said in his terse response.
“I can understand the plight of Salman and his party colleagues particularly when Prime Minister Narendra Modi gets a larger crowd in Sydney than what Salman’s leader gets in India,” he said in a statement soon after Modi addressed a large diaspora gathering in the Australian city.
Khurshid, a former External Affairs Minister, had expressed doubts over the genuineness of the big gathering of the people of Indian origin who had turned up to meet Modi at Myanmar's capital Nay Pyi Taw.
“I have been to Nay Pyi Taw twice. No one is found on the streets there. Then how come 20,000 people came to listen to him (Modi). He must have taken along many with him,” Khurshid had told mediapersons in Farukhabad in Uttar Pradesh on Saturday.