Pak interfering in Gujarat polls: PM

Manas Dasgupta

Palanpur, December 10

Targeting the Congress yet again, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today claimed that Pakistan was interfering in the Gujarat Assembly elections in favour of the Congress to make its Muslim leader Ahmed Patel the next Chief Minister of the state. 

Modi also tried to establish a link between the move to make Patel, the political secretary to the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, Chief Minister with the help of Pakistan and a “secret meeting” purported to have been held at the residence of the suspended Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar, which he claimed, was attended by top diplomats from Pakistan and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. 

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“The Congress must tell the country what is cooking behind the curtain and why its leaders are hobnobbing with the Pakistanis,” Modi said at a rally at Palanpur, the district headquarters of Banaskantha in north Gujarat, today. 

He raked up the Ahmed Patel issue even after the veteran leader having repeatedly denied any such move to make him the Chief Minister if the Congress was voted to power in the state. Such posters showing Ahmed Patel along with former director general of Pakistan army Sardar Arshad Rafiq making an “appeal” to make the veteran Congress leader the next CM had been doing the rounds in various parts of the state during the past few days following which Patel had vehemently denied the move. “The posters are BJP’s mischief. I was never an aspirant for the Chief Minister’s post and will not become one in the event of the Congress winning the elections,” Patel had stated. 

Claiming that news about the “three-hour long secret meeting” at Aiyar’s residence were “all over the newspapers and television channels” since yesterday, Modi said among those present besides Manmohan Singh were the Pakistani High Commissioner in India, a former Pakistani foreign minister and former Vice-President of India. He asked the audience, “Can you tolerate a party that is seeking Pakistan’s intervention to win elections?” 

Modi a magician: Rahul

Palanpur: Rahul continued to campaign for his party in the central and north Gujarat regions and offered prayers at the famous Dakor and Shamlaji temples and addressed a series of public meetings criticising the Modi administration both as the Chief Minister and now as the Prime Minister. He said Modi was a “big magician” who by his "magic charm take away chunks of land, water, power from the poor and transfer them to the pockets of the rich.”

He also alleged that during the past few days of campaigning, Modi had dropped the development plank and was trying to divert the issue of caste system and communalism with one-point programme of Congress bashing. — OC