Congress-BJP sparring over “the weakest Prime Minister” jibe grew intense on Monday as the ruling party made a U-turn and called Atal Bihari Vajpayee “the weakest Prime Minister India ever had” who “succumbed to BJP bullying” on Gujarat riots.
Congress spokesperson Sanjay Jha posted a series of tweets during the day calling Vajpayee “the weakest PM India ever had,” just three days after his party website praised the BJP veteran. “The weakest PM ever was AB Vajpayee, who wanted to sack Mr Modi for the ghastly Gujarat massacre, but succumbed to BJP bullying. The weakest PM India ever had, was AB Vajpayee, who gave Kandahar terrorists an escort-service and allowed Parliament to be attacked,” Jha tweeted three-days after the Congress praised Vajpayee. The tweets intensified the war of words over the memoirs of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s former media adviser Sanjaya Baru, who said the Congress president oversaw all major decisions of the Government and the PM was “defanged.”
“Dear Mr Modi/Jaitley. Just asking, but since you are so convinced about Sanjaya Baru, how about DG Vanzara’s letter-bombIJ RightIJ” Jha hit back, referring to the letter of a Gujarat police officer jailed in an encounter case, claiming that he had acted on the Modi Government’s orders.
The Congress spokesperson followed it up with a flurry of tweets that began with the words “the weakest PM ever was AB Vajpayee.” The Congress’ shocking U-turn on Vajpayee was a desperate attempt to return fire to the BJP, which has targeted Manmohan Singh as a weakling Prime Minister “remote controlled” by Congress president Sonia Gandhi before whom the latter had made “a complete surrender” during his decade-long tenure.
BJP veteran lK Advani said that Vajpayee had brought glory to the country by his handling of foreign affairs and keeping price rise under check and repeated his long-held view that Manmohan Singh was “the weakest Prime Minister” in post-Independent India.
“I have never seen such a weak Prime Minister... He has been the weakest Prime Minister ever,” Advani told an election meeting in Bihar echoing Singh’s former media adviser Baru’s book The Accidental Prime Minister — The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh.
The change of heart of the Congress leaders after profusely praising “Mr Vajpayee” to target Narendra Modi in the 2002 Gujarat riots, on its website “indicted” that the ruling party, bereft of any policy and programme for the country was speaking in “desperation” and was “utterly confused,” the BJP said. “Congress leaders are adopting Arvind Kejriwal’s ways of making U-turns,” said BJP spokesperson Nirmala Seetharaman and asked the Gandhi family, including Sonia and Congress vice-president Rahul to answer questions on “accountability” of the decisions made by the UPA Government rather than seeking answers from the BJP.
She said many thought that Advani was making a personalized attack by calling Singh “the weakest Prime Minister” in the 2009 elections, but now the book by the Prime Minister’s former media advisor and the latest one by the Coal Secretary also paints him the same way.
Crusader or ConspiratorIJ Coalgate and Other Truths by PC Parakh, who retired as Coal Secretary in 2005 said Singh’s inability to take on vested interests led to the so-called Coalgate scandal, which rocked his premiership.
Dismissing the Congress’ tirade against Vajpayee, Advani said: “No leader in the BJP can match the stature of former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Vajpayee’s six years as Prime Minister were better for India’s development than the long rule of Congress’s Prime Ministers Jawaharal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. Vajpayee’s tenure as PM was best ever.”
Advani claimed that Nehru and Indira Gandhi developed the country at a cost. “During Nehru’s rule, his biggest failing was defeat at the hands of China in the 1962 war and the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi was a historic blunder,” Advani said addressing election meetings in Bihar’s Banka and Katihar parliamentary constituencies..
Advani alleged that Singh hid his failure to rein in corruption and scams behind compulsions of coalition politics, but he was too weak a Prime Minister to prevent corruption among ministers in his Government.
“The Prime Minister should not have allowed corruption and scams to take place in the first place and exercised his authority to crack the whip against errant ministers. However, it was not to be, as he allowed himself to be manipulated by Congress leadership given his weakness as a person, which had denigrated the institution of Prime Minister and brought in chaos all around,” Advani alleged.