Taking a cue from Congress president Rahul Gandhi and indirectly calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi “Chowkidar Chor hain”, a belligerent Shiv Sena president Uddhav Thackeray on Monday warned the Government on the Ram Mandir issue, saying that Hindus would teach the BJP a lesson if it did not wake up from its slumber and keep its promise of building the Ram temple at Ayodhya.
Invoking the “Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan” slogan, Uddhav charged that the Modi Government had cheated soldiers through the Rafale scam and had taken the farmers for a royal ride through the crop insurance scam. “When we talk Jai Jawan, we see scam in the purchase of Rafake aircraft. When we talk about Jai Kisan, we have in front of us crop insurance scam. (Journalist-tuned-activist) P Sainath has said that the crop insurance scam is of the same magnitude as the Rafale scam. That being the case, do you expect us to back the Government that committed sins, merely on the Hindutva issue?,” the Sena president asked.
Addressing a huge public rally in the temple town of Phandarpur in western Maharashtra, Uddhav castigated the Modi Government at the Centre and BJP Government in the State on a host of issues, including Ram Mandir, Rafale and crop insurance scams, the BJP surrendering to Nitish Kumar and Ram Vilas Paswan, the Prime Minister’s promise to double the agricultural income, failure to extend relief to drought-affected farmers in the State, snooping notification efforts to bring in undeclared emergency in the country, failure to protect cow, violence on the issue of cow protection and the Devendra Fadnavis Government’s failure to implement the Rs 35,000 crore farm loan waiver scheme.
Uddhav made an indirect passing reference to “Chowkidar Chor hain”, when he spoke about the severe drought prevailing in Maharashtra. “I had recently gone to a village in Beed district where I saw a tree eaten away by insects. I could not even recognise it was a lemon tree, till an old farmer told me about it. This was the first time I was seeing such a sick lemon tree. The old man told me that there was a time we would use lemon juice to insects but the same lemon tree has been eaten away by insects. Such things do happen in country where these chowkidars have turned thieves in these strange days”.