Promising to transform Mathura-Vrindavan into a world tourist destination — another Mecca-Medina or Jerusalem — the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi on Monday vowed to liberate the country from the clutches of the ‘mother-son’ and ‘father-son’, an apparent reference to Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, and Mulayam Singh and Akhilesh Yadav.
In a whirlwind election tour of Mathura, an area considered to be the bastion of Mulayam Singh, Mr. Modi attacked the Congress and SP leaders amid chants of “Modi, Modi.”
While several independent observers conceded that the town has not witnessed such a massive gathering in recent years, the BJP was not mentioned even once in the Gujarat Chief Minister’s 25-minute speech. The prime ministerial hopeful made fleeting references to the BSP, which has a good support base here.
At his rally in Hardoi earlier, he pledged to decriminalise politics. “I have decided that when a new government is formed after May 16, I will set up a committee to find out what cases are pending against whom. Candidates submit in their form during filing nominations the details of cases against them. I will not discriminate in it. I will not spare whether those are from the BJP or the NDA.”
Mr. Modi went on to say: “I will ask the Supreme Court to hear the cases fast. Those, who have committed crime, will go to jail and their seats will go to candidates with clean image. No accused will dare to fight polls. Who says that this cleansing cannot happen? I have come to cleanse politics. It is necessary to free Indian democracy from criminalisation.”
At Mathura, he said that the only goal of parties such as the SP and the Congress in the current election was to stop him from becoming the PM as they know where they would end up once it happens.
Maintaining that there was a growing craze all over the world over Lord Krishna, he lamented that “Lord Krishna’s Yamuna has turned into a drain.” “Come to Gujarat and see how we have cleaned the Sabarmati River. I ask the Google gurus here to log on to the net and look at the transformation of the river in the course of a decade,” he said.
Saying that he hailed from a poor family and had seen mother cry when there was no firewood for cooking, the BJP leader ridiculed Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi for visiting homes of the poor the way a tourist visits the Taj Mahal. Flaying both the Congress and the SP for playing politics of dynasty and nepotism, the BJP leader was cutting in his comment on Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law Robert Vadra.
“For them all that matters is dynasty and nepotism. And now even the extended family is being covered. They are those, who are not ready to recognise the power of the community beyond their family members. These people, who think that that only their sons and daughters will do something and are concerned only with them or their uncle-aunt and insulting the future of Uttar Pradesh.”
