The Bharatiya Janata Party is personalising politics and degrading the quality of public life, the Congress said on Monday, reacting sharply to the main Opposition's offensive on its president Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
Sending out a tough message to the BJP, Congress media committee chairperson Janardan Dwivedi told journalists here: “Does the BJP want an investigation into the allegations levelled against its leaders from time to time by the very persons who were at some point of time close to them? ... Nobody knows who will stand where if fingers are raised at the top leadership of any party by digging into their past.”
He was apparently referring to the many allegations levelled by Jan Sangh and BJP deserters against their own top leaders, starting from the days of Balraj Madhok.
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Advising the BJP to “mend its language and its style of politics,” Mr. Dwivedi said the country would benefit if the “larger parties accepted that they had larger responsibilities in a democracy.”
Earlier at the Congress briefing, party spokesman Manish Tewari launched a no-holds-barred attack on the BJP, describing its political resolution adopted at Guwahati as a “bundle of lies,” and springing from a panic in its ranks, especially as many of its associates' names had been linked to terror attacks, in recent weeks.
He wanted to know why the BJP was raking up the Bofors issue, given that all cases had been quashed by the courts, and that though it had been in power for six years, it had also not been able to find any evidence in the case.
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Mr. Dwivedi said parties or leaders who indulged in personal attacks never succeeded. “Since freedom, whoever has done the politics of personal attacks has not succeeded. There were people who levelled baseless allegations against Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi but finally the Congress emerged victorious and those levelling allegations failed.