BJP’s MP Anurag Thakur accuses Cong of targeting PM Modi

New Delhi, February 26

A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP on Friday accused the previous UPA government of trying to settle scores with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

BJP Parliamentarian Anurag Thakur referred to news reports that quoted former Home Minister Home Minister P Chidambaram’s on Parliament attack convict Afzal Guru and former Home Secretary GK Pillai on Ishrat Jahan saying: “It was an attempt to fix Modi...it was a conspiracy to put in dock political rivals by the previous (UPA) government”.

"In Ishrat Jehan case, the affidavit submitted to the Gujarat High Court in 2009 about her links with LeT and her accomplices was changed at the political level. A deliberate attempt was made to malign the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi," Thakur said referring to recent remarks by former union home secretary GK Pillai.

"A conspiracy was hatched by the then ruling party to frame opposition leaders. Country wants to know who changed the affidavit at the political level," he said, before the House began discussing the Motion of Thanks to the President's address.

Members of Congress and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) accused the chair of "selectively" allowing some members to speak. 

‘Expunge derogatory remarks’

The Congress on Friday demanded that the alleged derogatory remarks made against its president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi by BJP member Anurag Thakur be expunged from the Lok Sabha proceedings.

"Some derogatory remarks were made against Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi by a member of the house terming them anti-national. How can a member of this house be anti-national," Mallikarjun Kharge, the leader of the Congress in he Lok Sabha asked after question hour ended.

"The remarks made against Congress leaders were derogatory and should have been expunged like the speaker expunged the references made in speech by Jyotiraditya Scindhia to the RSS, (Delhi BJP legislator) OP Sharma and Nathuram Godse," he added.

The Lok Sabha secretariat on Thursday released a list of words expunged from the discussion over the JNU row and the issue of the suicide of a Dalit scholar in Hyderabad University.

Objecting to the Congress demand, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Rajiv Pratap Rudy said it's the discretion of the Speaker to decide which reference should be expunged. 

The former home minister has been quoted by media reports as saying that Guru’s case “was perhaps not correctly decided".

Pillai has been quoted as saying that the affidavit submitted to Gujarat High Court in 2009 about LeT links of Ishrat Jahan and her accomplices, who were killed in an alleged fake encounter in 2004, was changed at the "political level".