“People don’t want to smell rotten onions anymore”, Narendra Modi asserted in onion country at Laxmangarh in Sikar, Rajasthan, on Monday, at the end of hectic back-to-back rallies at Lakhimpur Kheri and Shahjahanabad, Uttar Pradesh. Saluting the womanhood of Shekhawati for their glorious tradition of pledging their sons to the service of the nation while still in the womb, for rearing their sons to sacrifice for the nation, he contrasted the culture of the veeron ki bhumi (land of heroes) with the situation in the capital, where “a mother will sacrifice the nation for her son”.
Applauding the people for the grand victory bestowed upon the BJP in the recent Assembly elections, he predicted a certain change of Government at the Centre and said that the loose, uncultured and unconstitutional language being used by Congress leaders reflected their panic over their impending defeat. After decades of the politics of divide and rule, casteism and communalism, the Congress’ dreams lie shattered, he mocked, because in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, the voters roundly trounced the party and even dalits, minorities and tribals were elected on the BJP ticket!
The nation needs unity, amity, peace and brotherhood, and not the casteist poison being injected by the Congress which partitioned the country, created divides of rich and poor, high and low, and now tries to preach more obscurantism in the name of secularism. The situation has become so ridiculous, he said, that if he tried to raise the issue of jobs for youth, food security, corruption, crime against women, for each and every crisis the standard response of Congress is, ‘what about secularism?’ Exhorting the people to remove those who have looted the nation while wearing the mask of secularism (secularism ka naqab pehan kar loota hai desh ko), he mused that the Congress is now desperately trying to unite other parties in order to defeat him.
At Sikar, and earlier at Lakhimpur Kheri and Shahjahanabad, UP, the BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate greeted the people on the occasion of Ambedkar Jayanti, the maker of the Constitution of India, and said his handiwork gave Indians the right to vote and elect their governments. Dr Ambedkar, he said, gave the people rights which were never implemented by successive Congress regimes, yet today, one ‘shehzade’ insults him day and night by professing in every colony and bylane (gali, mohalla) that ‘we gave you this law, this right, this Act…’ Dismissing the Congress vice president as being incapable of understanding anything outside his family, Narendra Modi said that the rights given to citizens by the Constitution and Dr Ambedkar are being pocketed by the Congress “for family benefit”.
Alluding to the recently released book by the Prime Minister’s former media adviser Sanjay Baru, he thundered, “Sonia ji, shehzade ji, I ask you, the Constitution gave us freedom of speech. We can speak. But who took away this right from the Prime Minister? Sonia ji, the country wants to know who put a lock on the Prime Minister’s mouth.” This was widely perceived as the first installment of Narendra Modi’s retaliation for the intemperate language deployed by Rahul Gandhi at Doda a few days ago.
As the crowd roared in approval, the BJP leader accused the Congress of disrespecting Balasaheb Ambedkar, so much so that while three persons from one family got the Bharat Ratna, that too, almost immediately (i.e., while in office in the case of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, and soon afterwards in the case of Rajiv Gandhi), the party never cared to bestow this honour on the maker of the Indian Constitution. It was only four decades after his death that the honour was bestowed upon Dr Ambedkar (in 1990) by a Government supported by Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
Similarly, in Parliament, an institution created by the Constitution, there was no place for a portrait of this son of India under successive Congress regimes, and it was only after the party was ousted that the BJP and other parties installed his portrait in the august house. “Daliton de devata ke saath ye cong ne kaisa dur vyavhar kiya hai”, he said, adding that persons like him, from extremely backward families (ati pichra) could never have risen in life but for the equality enshrined by Ambedkar in the Constitution.
Jawaharlal Nehru, he said, had so much poison in his heart against Ambedkar that when the latter wrote a book on Gautam Buddha and requested the Government of India to buy one hundred copies, a small request by any standard, he was rebuffed. The Congress, Narendra Modi charged, has therefore no right to speak of the backward and depressed sections of society.
Lambasting the Congress, the BSP and the SP for cumulative failures of governance, he said it is a scandal that to this day there are no adequate sanitation facilities for women and they are vulnerable on this score. Despite decades in power, the Congress has been unable to provide safe drinking water to 75 per cent of the people, though Sonia ji drinks Bisleri water.
The coal scam has resulted in power stations that could generate 20,000 MW of power being shut down, and 75 per cent of the houses in Lakhimpur Kheri alone do not even have electricity connections. A district that was once renowned as a rice bowl is withering for want of water; from sugarcane the farmers have switched to growing potatoes, which makes them vulnerable to extortion at the mandis due to absence of cold storages. Gujarat, however, overcame the plight of potato farmers by providing good seeds and new techniques of agriculture based on water conservation, with the result that it gets the highest yields per hectare in the world and the produce is lapped up in the field itself by agro-industries from Kerala.
The Congress mainly, but also the BSP and the SP were equally responsible for the plight of backward classes, he charged. Rattling off statistics, he said that 13 people from backward castes are killed every week, 6 are kidnapped, 21 women are raped, 5 homes burnt down and 70 per cent of the women are illiterate; “Is this your shradhanjali to Ambedkar”. Why are so many women illiterate when a woman has been ruling the country for 10 years, he asked, and why do only 28 per cent homes have piped water and the rest trek 2 to 5 km daily for water?
Despite such huge failures, the Chief Minister says that he will not let Uttar Pradesh become like Gujarat, he mocked, adding that if farmers benefit, they will not care for him! Netaji (Mulayam Singh) recently came to the district in a helicopter, but could not dismount on account of a rampaging bull! If even a strong leader like Neta ji could not handle a bull, he joked, then the Chief Minister will certainly not be able to handle the babbar sher (lions) from Gujarat.
Warning that Lakhimpur Kheri being on the border with Nepal was vulnerable to plots to ruin the youth via fake currency notes, and drugs and narcotics, he called for caution because if the youth are ruined then the nation is ruined… The tragedy of UP, he lamented, is that one leader was engrossed in making elephant parks and the other cares only for lion safaris; there is none to care for the people. As UP goes for the second phase of polling on April 17, he urged the State to return the BJP from all 80 seats.
Niticentral.com, 14 April 2014