While throwing a challenge for an open debate on development and the Ram temple issue, Union Steel Minister and senior Congress leader Beni Prasad Verma mocked at Samajwadi Party president Mulayam SinghYadav for daydreaming of becoming the prime minister when law and order was steadily declining in Uttar Pradesh.
"Mulayam Singh Yadav has failed to manage UP well but is daydreaming to hold the coveted post of prime minister," Verma said while challenging the SP supremo for an open debate on the issues of development and Ram temple.Verma was talking to some media persons whom he had called at his residence on Saturday afternoon to justify distribution of freebies to journalists and people of his parliamentary constituency.He expressed surprise that the SP supremo was still nursing prime ministerial hopes despite law and order and development being at their lowest in the state ruled by his party.
Hitting out at the double standards of the SP, the Union minister said that on the one hand the party claimed to be the messiah of minorities and, on the other, it was against the anti-Communal Violence Bill. "Yadav will get a befitting reply from the people in the general election and his hopes (of becoming prime minister) will fall like a pack of cards," Verma said, adding that if Congress would not leave two seats for the SP supremo and his kin, even they would be defeated in the election.
He warned all political opponents not to take the Congress lightly as it would emerge victorious in the lok Sabha election with the support of the backwards and Muslims. Reiterating his charge that the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Samajwadi Party had entered into a "secret understanding", Verma pointed out that attacks by BJP prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi and Mulayam Singh Yadav on each other were nothing but shadow boxing.
While commenting on the clean chit to Modi and his aide, Amit Shah, in the Gujarat massacre case, the Union minister likened both to hardened criminals."Most hardened criminals go scot free during trial as no one dares to give evidence against them but people still call them gangsters and mafia," Verma said, wondering how Modi and Shah would get clean chit from the people who were witness to the massacre of innocent members of the minority community.
The minister said that the Steel Ministry had earned a profit of Rs 10,000 crore and two per cent of it would be spent on public welfare works by March 31. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) has said that the funds meant for the welfare of people should be spent in the same year. Verma defended the money spent recently on gifts. He said the Rs 1.75 crore spent on gifts was justified.