The Hindu : National : Vasundhara Raje confident BJP would return to power

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Vasundhara Raje confident BJP would return to power

Gargi Parsai

— Photo: Gargi Parsai

Rajasthan Chief Minister and BJP’s Chief Ministerial candidate Vasundhara Raje filing her papers at Jhalawar on Monday.

JHALAWAR: Unfazed by controversies, Rajasthan Chief Minister and Bharatiya Janata Party’s Chief Ministerial candidate Vasundhara Raje on Monday filed her nomination papers from her Jhalarapatan constituency here and expressed confidence that her party would return to power.

“Kaho dil se, Vasundhara phir se,” is the heady slogan coined by her supporters.

“Development is my priority. The world is fast turning competitive and we need to make a place for ourselves in the world,” she said.

She was accompanied by her MP son Dushyant and daughter-in-law Niharika, who at one point was projected to replace her in the constituency. Local journalists pored over her nomination papers and concluded that with her Rs. 3.2 crore assets and investments she was ‘poorer’ than some of her Ministers.

The Congress is making corruption an issue, accusing the Chief Minister of tolerating the ‘corruption’ of some of her Ministers. To this, Ms. Raje said: “Look who is talking – a party that has institutionalised corruption. The United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre has Ministers involved in the fodder scam, accused of murder and everybody knows about the use of money power to save the government in the July 22 trust vote.”

“I am proud to belong to a family that has given, not taken,” she later told a packed house at the BJP office here. Addressing the crowd, predominantly women, she said the 50 per cent reservation for women in the Panchayati Raj institutions was a way to empower them.

“If you empower women, you empower the family. We want to bring forward women and youth,” she said.

Speaking to journalists, she said for her the five years at the helm of affairs in Rajasthan had been “exciting” and she was pleased to make development an issue and bring the State on the growth path. Even her detractors admit that the State had seen development as never before. “Rajasthan is on the path of development and nobody can stop that now,” she said.

On the resentment in the Gujjar community for their failed agitation seeking reservation, she told The Hindu, “I have done what was to be done.”

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