During his election rallies, PM Modi repeatedly said Sonia and Rahul are “out on bail” in the National Herald case.
Bengaluru: A day after PM Modi levelled graft allegations against Congress stalwart Sonia Gandhi and her son and party president Rahul, she hit back, saying that Modi or the BJP has no moral right to talk about corruption.
“What happened to Lokpal?” she asked while addressing an election rally in the Lingayat-dominated Vijayapura in north Karnataka Tuesday.
“How can you talk about corruption, when you have corrupt leaders seated on your either side? You keep them next to you and talk about development, what sort development is that?” she added.
PM Modi, during his election rallies in the state, repeatedly said that the “mother and son are out on bail” in the National Herald case.
While Modi has proved to be a crowd-puller in Karnataka, the Gandhi family continues to have a sizeable support base in certain pockets of the state. Vijayapura is one such place where people still talk about “Indira amma” (former PM Indira Ganhdi) very fondly.
It was in 1978, just after the Emergency when Indira Gandhi decided to contest from Chikmagalur constituency in Karnataka for a by-election. She had reached out to people calling herself “daughter of the land”. Two decades later in 1999, her daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi contested from the Bellary Lok Sabha seat and defeated BJP’s Sushma Swaraj.
Sonia won the Bellary seat by a margin of over 46,000 votes. It is this very sentiment that the Congress party has decided to tap as they carefully chose the location for Sonia Gandhi’s first rally after a gap two years.
In 2006, while addressing a rally in Varanasi, she had taken ill and had to be flown in a helicopter back to Delhi for immediate medical care.
“Modiji, you are a wonderful orator and an actor. But what will you achieve with just speeches, you need to have commitment too,” Sonia said in Vijayapura Tuesday.
Sonia Gandhi reiterated what Rahul has been highlighting for the past few days as to how the Modi government has allegedly cheated the farmers and has only made tall claims. She also said it is actually chief minister Siddaramaiah who has given them development schemes.
But this has not stopped the BJP from calling Sonia’s visit as one of “sheer desperation”. “They have lost in 12 states and they are trying hard to save their only state in the south; they will lose this one too,” said BJP’s campaign in-charge and HRD minister Prakash Javadekar.