The former Union Minister and senior advocate, Ram Jethmalani, on Wednesday trained his guns on the Aam Aadmi Party for being the “team B of the Congress” and dubbed Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi as “thoroughly uneducated.”
Speaking at ‘Lawyers for Modi,’ a campaign he initiated to drum up support for the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate, Mr. Jethmalani said he was initially an AAP supporter, but was disillusioned with the party when its founder Prashant Bhushan told him that the party preferred Mr. Gandhi to Mr. Narendra Modi.
“I was aghast and even wrote to [AAP convener] Arvind Kejriwal, seeking his views. I had initially welcomed the AAP and even given a handsome donation to it. Mr. Kejriwal did not have the courage to affirm or deny what the founding father of his party told me. Instead, he sent two representatives who told me that Mr. Bhushan’s view is not the party line,” Mr. Jethmalani said.
He said Mr. Kejriwal sent him a note “full of abuses,” which said the BJP had expelled him, but he had not forgotten the party.
Mr. Jethmalani, who was expelled from the BJP on disciplinary grounds, said he was “unashamedly an admirer of Mr. Modi.”
The senior advocate was against Mr. Gandhi being made the Congress’s prime ministerial candidate. “He is not suited for the post. He is just not intellectually equipped for the job.”
He said Mr. Modi was falsely accused of being communal, though he got a clean chit from the Supreme Court-appointed Special Investigation Team that probed the Gujarat riots. “I am no great friend of his [Mr. Modi]. I am not even seeking any political office, help or preference. I am supporting Mr. Modi because it is in the national interest.”
