Reiterating that the raids by the I-T Department on leaders of non-BJP parties during elections were politically motivated, Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu said Prime Minister Narendra Modi owed an explanation on this “crackdown.”
I-T officials even searched the helicopters used by Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik and his Karnataka counterpart H.D. Kumaraswamy, and they did not spare DMK leader Kanimozhi in Tamil Nadu and Janata Dal (S) leader H.D. Revanna in Karnataka.
Apparently, the BJP misused the I-T Department and other constitutional bodies to target its political rivals, he observed.
Addressing a press conference at Praja Vedika on Wednesday, Mr. Naidu wondered why the BJP leaders were not touched by the I-T Department and insisted that if the timing of raids was a matter of coincidence, there should be a proper justification for it.
He asserted that the BJP was trying every trick in the bag to come to power but the TDP and its allies would not allow that to happen.
Comments on CS
Mr. Naidu said if there was no personal agenda behind their complaint to the Governor on his comments on Chief Secretary L.V. Subrahmanyam, why did the retired IAS officers not speak out when his predecessor Anil Chandra Punetha and SPs were arbitrarily transferred by the ECI.
On the malfunctioning of EVMs, Mr. Naidu asked where have all the engineers, which the ECI claimed to have deputed to troubleshoot, gone as thousands of machines were hit by technical snag soon after polling began.
He also wanted to know what was holding the ECI back from counting VVPATs as per Supreme Court directions. During the polling in A.P., it was the YSR Congress Party activists who resorted to violence, he alleged and took strong objection to the alleged deletion of 25 lakh votes in Telangana and the attempt to delete eight lakh votes in Andhra Pradesh. It was surprising why information regarding requests made online for deletion of votes was not being made public. Was it to protect the wrongdoers, he asked.
Mr. Naidu said the Goods and Services Tax and demonetisation were “big blunders” of the Modi dispensation and questioned what were its true achievements.
