Taking strong exception to the Prime Minister’s offensive attempt to link Rajiv Gandhi with the 1984 riots, Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh on Friday threw the Lok Sabha battle hat back into Narendra Modi’s ring by drawing a comparison with the Godhra massacre, which took place under the latter’s chief ministership in Gujarat.
“It is wrong of Modi to connect Rajiv with the anti-Sikh riots of 1984...What if someone starts linking Modi with Godhra?,” he asked, adding that it did not behove the Prime Minister of the country to stoop to such levels to win an election.
He said that if some individual leaders were allegedly involved in the riots, they should be punished as per law. “Since the riots had happened, I had been saying that I had heard accusations about the involvement of Sajjan Kumar, HKL Bhagat, Dharam Das Shastri, Lalit Maken and Arjun Das, and, till date, I stand by my statement,” he added.
However, he asserted that the involvement of some individuals did not mean Modi could try to implicate Rajiv or the Congress party in the riots. By the same yardstick, Modi should also have been implicated in the Godhra attack, he added, asking the Prime Minister to refrain from undermining the prestige of his position with such crude and baseless statements.
Modi should not forget that names of several BJP and RSS leaders had figured in the 1984 riots FIR, said Capt Amarinder, calling for action, as per the law, against all those found responsible for the mayhem unleashed on innocent Sikhs.
The Chief Minister said that Modi was unnecessarily dragging Rajiv’s name to court controversies and divert attention, with his lies, from the real issues.
Modi’s false claims to nationalism and his cheap efforts to take credit for the armed forces’ accomplishments was also in line with his strategy to divert attention of the people from the grassroots issues of unemployment, corruption, farmer suicides, economic regression etc, the Chief Minister said adding that in his 50 years of being in politics, he had never seen a Prime Minister come down to such levels.