Launching his party's Lok Sabha poll campaign in West Bengal, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Saturday, 23 March, trained his guns on both Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, accusing them of failing to fulfill their promises.
Reiterating his "chowkidar chor hain" barb at Modi, the Congress president said,
‘Only rich people have chowkidars outside their houses. Farmers and the poor don’t have watchmen. He (Modi) is the ‘chowkidar’ of the corrupt and fugitives such as Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and Vijay Mallya.’
In a scathing attack on the TMC government in West Bengal, Gandhi said, "What kind of governance is she delivering where only she has the right to speak and nobody else has any say? Nothing has changed in Bengal in the past years. There has been no development of Bengal under Mamata Banerjee's rule. She too has not fulfilled her promises.”
“People used to be targeted and terrorised under Left rule and the same continued under Mamata Banerjee,” Rahul Gandhi said.
Gandhi's rally in the North Malda constituency, once a Congress bastion, assumes significance as the party is facing an uphill task to hold on to its base due to large-scale defections of party leaders, including its sitting MP Mausam Benazir Noor, to the Trinamool Congress.
The BJP too has been surging in the area, with several leaders from opposition parties, including the CPI(M), joining it recently. The BJP nominee from the seat is Khagen Murmu, a CPI(M) MLA who recently joined the party.
Without naming Noor, niece of late Congress stalwart A B A Ghani Khan Chowdhury, who has been fielded by the TMC this time, Gandhi said she "cheated you by leaving the party" and appealed to the electorate to vote for Congress candidate Isha Khan Chowdhury.
He promised that if his party comes to power, it would bring in minimum income guarantee scheme. “The Congress is fighting to keep the country united and the upcoming Lok Sabha elections will be a fight between ideologies of the Congress and the BJP-RSS,” Gandhi said.
(This copy has been edited for length.)
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