leader of Opposition in the lok Sabha Sushma Swaraj on Saturday said that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh preferred to address Congress party workers instead of a public meeting as he did not have the courage to face the public in Raipur on his visit to Chhattisgarh.
“It has never happened with any Prime Minister that one comes for election campaign and could not even face the people.The PM’s speech at the Congress workers’ meet had not just one but a total bag of lies,” she said in a Press conference here.
Swaraj said that Manmohan Singh in his speech claimed that the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) was given by the Centre to Chhattisgarh. “The fact remains that when I was the Union Health Minister in 2003, I visited AIIMS in New Delhi and saw how people carried patients in their arms to get them treated in the hospital. I asked the then AIIMS Director, from where these large number of patients come to the hospital. Statistics were provided to me sometime later in which it was found that maximum number of patients arrived from States of Odhisha, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Uttaranchal to AIIMS for treatment in New Delhi,” Swaraj said.
“A decision was taken immediately by me to open AIIMS establishments in all the five States none of which were BJP-ruled States at that time,” she added.
The Centre during the Congress rule under Ajit Jogi asked for 100 acres of land from the Chhattisgarh Government which was allotted and a boundary was raised within 10 months for setting up AIIMS in Raipur, she said.
“Today, if someone is claiming that AIIMS was given by his Government, I want to ask him that for five years there was no work done on the project. Not a single brick for the establishment was laid,” Swaraj said.
“I had decided that the work of the AIIMS building, including hiring of staff and faculty should be complete in two years so that it does not get late. It’s after nine years, the building is ready, admissions have taken place and yet it is not fully functional. So the work we (NDA Government) did , they (Congress) kept the work closed for five years. The AIIMS establishment was the gift of the NDA rule,” she added.
On Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s remark in an election speech that the nomination of Nand Kumar Patel as CM was a certainity in Chhattisgarh if he was alive, Swaraj said that the BJP is assured about the fact that Chief Minister Raman Singh would have proved heavy for any CM nominee of the Congress party in Chhattisgarh.