New Delhi: Calling Congress president Rahul Gandhi a “failed student” whose speeches in Parliament, including on the Rafale deal, have “college-level lumpenisation in content”. senior BJP leader and Union minister Arun Jaitley accused the Opposition party on Sunday of launching fake campaigns. He said a “new emerging breed of institution protectors” has emerged, which criticise the government the most and simultaneously argue that free speech is in danger and shed “crocodile tears for democracy” and make every effort to convert the world’s largest democracy into a dynastic one.
“The past two months have witnessed several fake campaigns. Each one of them has failed to cut much ice. Falsehood doesn’t have longevity. The ‘compulsive contrarians’ continued to jump from one falsehood to another. The Rafale deal not only strengthens the combat ability of the Indian Air Force but saved thousands of crores for the exchequer. When its falsehood collapsed, a half document was produced to perpetuate the falsehood. Little did the creators of this falsehood realise that the cost of producing half a document is the loss of full credibility,” Mr Jaitley wrote on his Facebook page.
Mr Jaitley further said history will record that Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s great-grandson has “singularly damaged” India’s Parliament as an institution more than anyone else, with the Congress attempting to disrupt both Houses, and cited examples of how the Opposition party had attacked and interferred in the judiciary, the Election Commission, the armed forces, the RBI and the CBI. “If we analyse Rahul Gandhi’s two speeches on Rafale, they are based on a personal hatred for the Prime Minister emanating from envy. A failed student always hates the class topper. Additionally, the context of the speeches points more to college-level lumpenisation in content,” said the senior BJP leader, while praising two MPs of Opposition parties, BJD’s Bhartruhari Mahtab and RSP’s N.K. Premachandran, for filling up the “intellectual vacuum” lrft by the Congress in Parliament.
Lashing out at the Congress over its “self-contradictory” stand on multiple issues, Mr Jaitley said while it slaughters a cow before the cameras in Kerala, it invokes the National Security Act against cow killers in Madhya Pradesh, and labelled the opposition as “institution protectors” who support the legitimising of illegal infiltrators into India and aligned with Maoists in the recent Chhattisgarh elections.
“Rahul Gandhi stood shoulder to shoulder with the ‘Tukde Tukde’ gang at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The Congress was in the forefront of defending the ‘urban Naxals’ in court. And yet it claims to be a friend of both the idea of India and its institutions. It is about time India and its institutions are protected from these ‘institution wreckers’,” the Union minister noted.
Accusing the Congress of organising the loot of banks between 2008-2014, Mr Jaitley said the party was now alleging industrial loans had been waived. He said the government had consistently maintained an arm’s length distance with the EC and the attack on EVMs was not merely to allay defeat, it was an attack on the EC. He also said it was the Opposition which first questioned the existence of the surgical strike and then played it down as a routine action which had also taken place in the past.
On the RBI, Mr Jaitley said Congress governments in the past had been liberal in asking governors of the country’s central bank to step down.
