The Hindu : National : Brinda mocks Congress ‘fashion’ of choosing PM

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Brinda mocks Congress ‘fashion’ of choosing PM

Special Correspondent

“Third Front’s choice will be democratic”

KOLKATA: CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Brinda Karat on Tuesday said “the only fashion the Congress knows is the fashion that the Prime Minister can only be a person chosen by the Congress president.” “This is a mockery of democracy,” she told The Hindu over telephone from Malda in West Bengal.

Ms. Karat was commenting on Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s remark that “it has become fashionable these days for everyone to project oneself as Prime Minister.”

“This time round the people will prefer a more democratic fashion, when the non-Congress, non-BJP parties comprising the Third Front will decide in a democratic way who the Prime Minister should be,” Ms. Karat said.

She expressed these views at election meetings in the Malda Uttar and Malda Dakshin parliamentary constituencies. Ms. Karat said Ms. Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi had visited the State as leaders of a party “that is a junior partner in an alliance which has covert and overt links with Maoists and their violent activities as well as many other forces operating in north Bengal with the singular aim of dividing West Bengal.” “This is perhaps why neither of the two leaders had anything to say in condemnation of such forces.”

Ridiculing their references to lack of development in the State, Ms. Karat said: “Instead of giving a report card of West Bengal to its people, she [Ms. Gandhi] would do well to give the report cards of the State governments in Maharashtra, where a kisan [farmer] commits suicide every 30 minutes, and in Delhi on the issue of price rise. People would like to know what the report cards of the governments there have to show.”

On Mr. Gandhi’s comments that the condition of people in Purulia district was worse than that in Orissa’s Kalahandi, Ms. Karat said the situation in Amethi and Rae Bareili (from where Mr. Gandhi and his mother are contesting) was a lot worse.

This was another instance of “helicopter politics because you look at things from afar and never see reality where the facts and figures are very different,” the CPI(M) leader said.

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