Launching a counter attack on Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who has asked party members to aggressively fight the Bharatiya Janata Party for stalling the Parliament proceedings over the alleged coal block allotment scam, the BJP on Wednesday said it was ready to face any challenge from the Congress and “its workers were ready to fight the Congress on every street”.
Participating in a workshop organised by the Bangalore city unit of the BJP here, to create awareness among party workers on the weeklong membership drive to be launched by the party, BJP national general secretary H.N. Ananth Kumar said there was no question of the BJP allowing the Parliament to transact business till its demands were heeded.
In an obvious reference to Ms. Gandhi’s remarks that “blackmailing has become bread and butter of the BJP”, Mr. Kumar alleged that “it is the UPA government and Ms. Sonia who are blackmailing the entire country, including administration and agriculture”.
He said the countdown had started to the collapse of the UPA government at the Centre in the wake of the CAG’s report exposing lack of transparency in allocation of coal mines. The mood in the entire country is to see the ouster of the UPA and to elect the BJP to power, he claimed.
On zero loss
Disagreeing with the Congress theory on zero loss to the exchequer, he said the favours have already been made as balance sheets of the private companies that have been allocated these mines would look healthy resulting in their share prices going up. This would have also helped them get more loans from financial institutions, he said.
He targeted the media for criticising the BJP over stalling the Parliament’s proceedings. “Should we keep quiet and allow the Parliament to transact when the country is being looted,” he asked. He said: “The media should know that it is because of our stalling of the Parliament that the government cancelled the allocation of nine licences with respect to use of spectrum for mobile telephony bandwidth and ordered a re-tender with a base price of Rs. 14,000 crore each.”
