Without naming the Chief Minister Harish Rawat directly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi significantly alluded to him four times during his nearly one-hour-long speech, leaving no one in doubt who he meant, something that confirmed the fact that the ensuing electoral battle in the hill state is all set to boil down to a straight fight between the PM and the CM.
In a rebuttal to the CM’s charge that the project the foundation of which he unveiled on Tuesday was nothing but a political stunt to woo the electorate in the run-up to the election, Modi said he did not believe in the cheap politics of stunt. “Before going ahead with a project, I first ensure budgetary provision. The all- weather road is no exception. Here what is happening is just the reverse. The state government is busy unveiling myriad projects day in and day out in a frenzied spree without providing budgetary back-ups. Now, it is for the people to discriminate between what is political stunt and what is not. The state is now slipping into a dungeon of stultified growth, needing a dual engine to pull it out,” Modi said.
Recalling the election campaign meetings he addressed here ahead of the general election-2014, he said that the turnout then was not as spectacular as it was on Tuesday. “However, my party swept the general election clean, bagging all the five seats up for grabs. Does not today’s greater turnout signify the desperation on the part of the people to usher in a regime changeIJ” he asked.
like other saffron leaders, he did not forget to invoke the legacy of the former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, calling him as the person who was instrumental in carving Uttarakhand out of erstwhile Uttar Pradesh in 2000. “Atalji’s contribution prods us to take the challenge of the state’s all-out development. We have taken pledge to make the hill state a Uttam (best) state,” Modi said while selling out the development dream to the people of the state, grappling long with migration of the youths from the villages and shirking agriculture and plummeting employment opportunities.
Referring to the alleged disaster relief scam in the aftermath of the 2013 tragedy, Modi sarcastically said that while some people elsewhere are supposed to be gulping money here the scooter is doing the same.
Mention worthy, it was found through an RTI reply that the vehicles used for the disaster relief by the officials had consumed 25 liters instead of five liters. later, the vehicles which were said to have consumed fuel that exorbitantly were found out to be scooters.
Seeking to endear himself to the mass of the people here, PM said that the fruits of the projects his government has been initiating, be it electrification, national highway or OROP, are now trickling down to the grass-roots of the state.
Whenever he asked the people in attendance to raise their hands in confirmation of what he was claiming they roared in affirmative shouts to cheer the PM, something that enthused him to go on with his humour-tinged all-out attack on his political adversary.