Rejecting “the outsider tag”, senior BJP leader Arun Jaitley on Sunday hit back at his rival Amarinder Singh by raising the foreign origin issue of Congress president Sonia Gandhi. Jaitley wanted to know from him as to which State in India did Sonia Gandhi belonged to and accused his lok Sabha Congress opponent to “a lower level of debate”.
The Congress leader got back at him by reminding the BJP leader “the Indian tradition” where, he said, daughter-in-law is the “real inheritor” of the family legacy. In his blog titled Campaign Diary, Jaitley reasoned that “a polite answer” is necessary to “Captain Sahib” for calling him “an outsider”.
“Despite my ancestral roots in Punjab, Captain Sahib (Amarinder) called me an “outsider” and a “pseudo” Punjabi. Will he be kind enough to tell me which State in India does (Congress president) Mrs Sonia Gandhi belong toIJ” the BJP leader wrote.
“Regrettably, he is resorting to his old USP — lower the level of debate through personalised and discourteous language... I have to resist the temptation of reciprocating in the same manner. However, a polite response is necessary,” Jaitley wrote on his blog. The former Punjab Chief Minister is the Congress opponent of Jaitley in the Amritsar lok Sabha constituency.
He slammed Jaitley saying, “I always thought Jaitley was a gentleman, but I am sorry to read about his shameless attempts to question the statehood of Gandhi when she had nothing to do about what I had said yesterday in a newspaper interview about Mr Jaitley.
“But let me remind Jaitley of our great Indian culture and tradition which accepts the daughters-in-law as the real inheritors of the house and not the daughters irrespective of which place they come from.” Jaitley said Singh has still not come to the constituency while he after winning the polls, will have both office and residential base in Amritsar.
“But will he ever be available to the people of Amritsar at all. Past experience shows that he has been inaccessible not only to the people but also to his own party leaders, including his Ministers. His availability is only for a few hours since otherwise his palace is always inaccessible to the common man,” said the BJP leader. Jaitley was responding to Singh’s poser whether he will shift to Amritsar if he wins the seat.
Replying to Jaitley’s charges on his accessibility, Singh said, “My accessibility and affection of people must be already known to you by now after the announcement of my candidature from here (Amritsar).”