Rubbishing the story of ‘Narendra Modi’, having started out as a small time tea vendor, Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde on Friday labelled it as an effort to touch an emotional chord with voters at the election time.
The senior Minister, on an election campaign tour here recalled, “I have known Modi from the mid-1990s when he was BJP in-charge for Himachal and I was the Congress in-charge of the State. We met many times then also and many more times since then, but never has the tea vendor story been narrated. It has only come up in the past six months.”
The defiant Congressman said that post May 16, UPA-III Government under Sonia Gandhi’s leadership would be formed. The BJP’s ‘Modi for PM’ campaign was nothing more than the India Shinning Campaign of 2004 that burst on the day election results were announced.
“Rahul Gandhi is our prime ministerial candidate,” Shinde responded to a media query.
The Home Minister reiterated that the Government was going ahead to appoint a judge to head a Commission that will go into the Snoopgate case, which allegedly involved illegal surveillance of a woman architect by the Modi Government in Gujarat.
“It is a Cabinet decision that was taken much before the elections were announced,” said Shinde, and denied that the Government was being vindictive or raking up the contentious issue, was a violation of the election code of conduct.
Such brazen intrusion into the privacy of women, what will happen to girls in the countryIJ The Commission will do its job, he added.
“A parliamentary election, which is normally, should be about policy, national and international issues but the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate has lowered the discourse by making personal attacks on Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi,” said Shinde.
About nabbing Dawood Ibrahim, the Home Minister said that even the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA Government had failed to get hold of him despite having made tall claims.
He said that under UPA I & II unprecedented work had been done. Anti-corruption and violence against women law had been enacted and despite all odds the country’s growth rate was 4.5 per cent, which was much better than most countries.
Against a total electricity generation capacity of 1.12 lakh MW in 2004, in 10 years of UPA Government, a capacity addition of 1.25 lakh MW had been made, said the Minister.