Prime Minister Narendra Modi cannot seem to have enough of the Opposition’s INDIA coalition, once again taking on the new axis by invoking the “Indira is India” slogan of the seventies and drawing comparisons with the British East India Company and the outlawed Popular Front of India.
Modi, who has been adamantly averse to making a statement in Parliament on the civil war-like situation in Manipur, seemed unable to restrain himself when it came to the Opposition’s move to join hands against him under a new name. The Opposition has been forced to move a no-confidence motion against the government in the Lok Sabha to compel Modi to speak on Manipur.
Addressing a rally in poll-bound Rajasthan, Modi particularly targeted the Congress and accused the party of being filled with “ahankar” (arrogance). He said arrogance had led to the slogan “Indira is India and India is Indira”.
“Then the people of the country gave them a fitting reply by defeating them across the country,” Modi said, referring to the Congress’s rout in the 1977 general election, post the Emergency.
“People filled with arrogance are repeating the same sin now. They are saying UPA is India, India is UPA,” Modi added, stressing that they would meet the same fate in the Lok Sabha elections next year. Modi said the new name INDIA was to cover the misdeeds of the UPA and mislead the people.
“It’s like a company caught doing fraud, re-starting operations under a new name to mislead the people,” he said, claiming that the UPA had morphed into INDIA to cover its “paap” (sin).
The Prime Minister repeated what he had told BJP MPs at a closed-door meeting earlier this week, equating the Opposition’s new name with the British East India Company and outlawed terror outfits like Simi and the PFI.
“I want to tell another thing to the people of Rajasthan — that their (the Opposition’s) method is the same as that adopted by the enemies of the country,” Modi said.
“In the past too, efforts have been made to hide their sins by using India. ‘India’ was there in East India Company too but it was not out of devotion to Bharat but to loot Bharat,” he said, adding that even Simi had “India” in its name but its mission was to rip apart the country with terror strikes.
Modi invoked Mahatma Gandhi and said there was a need to raise his “Quit India” slogan again to ensure the country’s progress and future, urging the people to reject the Opposition’s alliance.
“The Quit India mantra has to be repeated now. The way Gandhiji gave the slogan to throw out the British from the country, we have to give the slogan of ‘Corruption; quit India, Dynasty; quit India, ‘Appeasement; quit India’...,” Modi said.
The Prime Minister, who has just spoken once on the video of two Manipur women being paraded naked and sexually assaulted, went all out against incidents of crime against women in Congress-ruled Rajasthan, seeking to make it the poll slogan.