A day after BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi accused the Congress of step-motherly treatment to Jharkhand, Congress on Monday hit back at the BJP for “misleading” the people and pointed out that the Opposition party had ruled the State for 8 years out of its 13 years of existence.
Union Minister Jairam Ramesh, Chairing the Coordination Committee for Congress-JMM-RJD alliance Government in Jharkhand, also sought to turn the table on BJP over its chief Rajnath Singh’s pitch for increasing the number of State Assembly seats from 81 to 150 to give adequate representation to 33 million people of the State.
In a hard-hitting letter to Singh, Ramesh told him that it was the “mistake” of then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee to create the new State with so less number of Assembly seats.
“This attempt to mislead was made through ‘Modivaani’ that came from that State. The reality is different. It’s all misleading talk. Narendra Modi and Rajnath Singh said in Ranchi that Jharkhand is poor and so people should ensure their victory in all 14th lok Sabha seats in the next general election. Out of 13 years since Jharkhand came into being, the State had BJP Chief Ministers for more than eight years. Then the biggest responsibility is on them, which he forgets. For eight years and two months, it was a BJP Government. The primary responsibility is of BJP,” Ramesh said in his letter.
At the AICC briefing, party spokesperson Sandeep Dikshit said when Modi says that everything was destroyed in Jharkhand, he should also see who ran the Governments there all this while.
“We (Congress) are there in Government for just last three months. When Modi commented about lack of development in Jharkhand, he forgot that it was the first time that Congress has participated in any Government since the State was formed. BJP was the first to form a Government there after the creation of Jharkhand and they ruled for the maximum period there. May be Modi realises that the development juggernaut of BJP got halted in Jharkhand,” Dikshit said.