The Congress on Thursday released a video clipping showing BJP leader Uma Bharti levelling serious charges against Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi. In the three-year-old video clipping, Uma is heard saying that Modi was not ‘Vikas Purush’ (man who brought in development) but ‘Vinash Purush’ (man who destroyed).
Sources say that Uma reportedly said this at a time when she did not have close relations with the BJP and had floated her own outfit, Bharatiya Janshakti Party. She is also allegedly heard calling Modi dictatorial, an agent of destruction and describing his development claims of Gujarat as a “sham”.
In the audio-visual presentation, the BJP’s firebrand leader is seen saying that she never saw “Hindus so frightened as in Gujarat” and that “Gujarat has become a fear stricken state”. The video CD, which Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi admitted was of a period when Bharti was not in the BJP, shows the firebrand leader debunking the development claims of the Gujarat Chief Minister as well his Hindutva pitch.
“I know him since 1973... He is not a Vikas Purush but a Vinash Purush. His claim of GDP growth and the uplift of people from the BPl to APl category is fake...In the last five years, Gujarat became a bigger debtor. Gujarat got neither Ram nor Roti. It should be freed from the Vinash Purush. It is media which has made Modi so big, inflated the balloon. Since it is who have inflated the balloon, you will have to deflate it,” Bharti says in the video.
latching on to the video clip, Singhvi said while it is true that Bharti was not in the BJP when she said this, the fact also remains that she was “not saying these things in the middle of an election speech” and hence, there has to be some truth in what a senior leader like he says.
“If somebody does not make such remarks during election days, it means there is more truth in that... She has not rejected so far what she had said. These comments on the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate were made by a senior leader like Bharti,” Singhvi said. The AICC plans to release the video clip on Wednesday failed after the CD player failed to work.