New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Monday created quite a row when he called Jaish-e-Mohammad chief as Masoor Azharji during his address to the party workers here.
Targetting the BJP for the release of Azhar during the Kandahar hijacking, Mr Gandhi said: “These people with 56 inch chest, you would recall, in their previous government, the current national security advisor Ajit Doval went in an aircraft with Masood Azhar ji and handed over him there in Kandahar.”
The Bharatiya Janata Party latched on to his reference to throw “Rahul loves terrorists” barb at the Congress chief.
BJP leader and Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said: “Come on Rahul Gandhi ji! Earlier it was the likes of Digvijay ji who called Osama ji and Hafiz Saeed Sahab. Now you are saying ‘Masood Azhar ji’. What is happening to Congress Party?”
But the Congress party hit back accusing its rival of deliberately twisting Mr Gandhi’s comments made with sarcasm. Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala accused the BJP and a section of media of deliberately twisting Mr Gandhi’s remarks.
A day after Lok Sabha elections were announced, Mr Gandhi launched a scathing attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying that now the choice was between Mahatma Gandhi’s India or Godse’s India with love on one hand and hate on the other.”
He also laid to rest all speculations that the party was going to stitch together any alliance with the AAP, saying that the Congress would on its own win all the seven Lok Sabha seats in Delhi.
The party had lost all the parliamentary seats in Delhi to BJP in the 2014 elections. It also had to face a humiliating defeat by not winning even a single seat in the 2015 Assembly elections.
Mr Gandhi also chose the occasion to launch an all-out attack on Mr Modi by flaying him on a host of issues such as the Rafale deal, employment generation, national security and alleged agrarian distress.
