Terming BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi’s remarks on the 2002 Gujarat riots as part of an “image makeover” before the lok Sabha polls, the Congress on Saturday questioned its timing.
“This is just an attempt of an image makeover. I do not want to cast any aspersions...But the question does come up to my mind. Ten to 12 years is a long period in public life. There were moments when there was pressure on him to do so. But he never did it earlier. Why is he suddenly doing it just before lok Sabha electionsIJ Why after so many years, he has become so emotional not to leave any word in the dictionary to say all thisIJ...Ask him why he did not express his pain and anguish earlier,” general secretary Ambika Soni said.
A day after a magistrate’s court upheld a clean chit given to him by a Supreme Court-appointed probe panel in the massacre of 68 people in Gulberg Housing Society in Ahmadabad during the riots, Modi said he did not see the ruling as a personal victory or defeat. Besides in a 1,000-word blog containing his most detailed comments on the 2002 riots, Modi on Friday said that he felt “absolute emptiness” on witnessing such “inhumanity”.
When asked about the party’s current stand on Arvind Kejriwal’s AAP Government in Delhi, Soni said the Congress supported it otherwise people would have faced financial burden of another election. To a question by the media about possibilities of Congress withdrawing support from AAP at a later stage amid voices of protest within the party over the issue, she said, “I do not think that the party acts in a negative manner...It (the decision to support AAP) must have been taken with a common consensus...It was something that the circumstances warranted.”