To Rahul Gandhi's charge that the Home Minister knew nothing about the Naga Accord that the Mr Modi spearheaded, Rajnath Singh accused the Congress leader of misleading Parliament.
Highlights
- Sushma Swaraj, Arun Jaitley, Rajnath Singh hit out at Rahul Gandhi
- Gandhi's charges 'false, baseless, immature,' say PM Modi's top ministers
- In Lok Sabha speech, Gandhi said PM hardly consults his senior ministers
Top three ministers in Prime Minister Narendra Modi's cabinet led the BJP's counter-attack on Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday evening for his speech attacking Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the Lok Sabha.
When Mr Gandhi was speaking in the Lok Sabha, Mr Modi, Home Minister Rajnath Singh, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj were not present in the house but he named all of them in his speech. Mr Modi does not consult his ministers, Mr Gandhi charged.
He began his speech by referring to an amnesty scheme for black money holders in the budget, saying, "Modiji's fair and lovely scheme is here to convert black money into white."
"The Prime Minister cannot run the country on only his opinion. The country is not the Prime minister. The Prime Minister is not the country," Mr Gandhi said. He also attacked the Prime Minister on his sudden visit to Pakistan earlier this year, alleging that he "single-handedly destroyed six years of our work" to isolate Pakistan as a supporter of terror. Mr Gandhi said Ms Swaraj was unaware of Mr Modi's sudden visit to Pakistan Prime Minister's ancestral home. Ms Swaraj said she was not present in the house, if she had been she would have corrected Mr Gandhi. "I want to set the record straight, that in Afghanistan when PM talked with Nawaz Sharif, he called me immediately afterwards to take my opinion. And I told him it'd be an 'out-of-the-box' initiative, so you should go to Lahore," she said in her statement in the evening.
Mr Jaitley hit back in a Facebook post. "As one evolves from a young to a middle-aged one, we certainly expect a certain level of maturity. The more I hear Shri Rahul Gandhi, the more I start wondering "how much does he know - when will he know".
"The Prime Minister should be the natural leader of the party and the Government. In the NDA it is so. The UPA was quite different. The Prime Minister is to lead by example," he said.
To Mr Gandhi's charge that the Home Minister knew nothing about the Naga Accord that the Mr Modi spearheaded, Mr Singh accused the Congress leader of misleading Parliament. "I had several rounds of consultations with the PM on Naga peace process. I strongly condemn Shri Rahul Gandhi's attempt to mislead the House," Mr Singh said in a tweet calling his statement "false and baseless."