Raising the pitch against his opponents, particularly the Congress, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday equated the disruption of Parliament over demonetisation by Opposition parties to the “cover fire” and distraction offered to terrorists by the Pakistani Army to facilitate infiltration.
In a similar fashion, the Opposition parties was devising “new tactics” and showing “new ways” to help the “dishonest”, he said at a function at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, which is his Lok Sabha constituency. “When Pakistan wants to send infiltrators into India, it starts firing on the border. That keeps our Army busy in the crossfire and the infiltrators manage to sneak in ... they get cover. These days, you must have seen the tu-tu main-main [arguments] in Parliament ... provides cover to cheats. Now I know who is really benefiting from the disruptions.”
Mr. Modi narrated the example of a group of pickpockets collaborating to distract the police to allow the escape of the main executioner of the theft, to push his point.
In a counter-attack on the Opposition for their argument that the government had failed to assess the consequences of demonetisation, Mr. Modi said he had not anticipated the support the “dishonest” would get from his political opponents. “When I was strategising for demonetisation, I had an assessment of many things. But I had never imagined or calculated that some politicians and political parties would so brazenly stand beside the dishonest,” he said.
Mr. Modi ridiculed Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi for his oratory and political skills, and even made a sarcastic reference to his threat of causing a tremor by making bombshell revelations about the Prime Minister’s alleged involvement in corruption. Mr. Modi, however, chose to ignore the allegations, instead sticking to an aggressive front.
‘Youth leader’
Terming Mr. Gandhi a yuva neta (youth leader), he said that since the Nehru-Gandhi scion “started speaking and learnt to speak”, there was “no end to his happiness”. Back in 2009, there was no way of figuring out what Mr. Gandhi had in store, Mr. Modi went on, but today all was clear. “We did not know what was inside the packet then. Now we are coming to know,” he said.
Mr. Modi criticised former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s speech in Parliament against cashless economy on the premise of poverty. It amounted to Dr. Singh’s own admission of failure on removing poverty, he said.
