Congress renews attack on Gadkari, calls him a pygmy

The Congress-BJP war of words escalated on Thursday with the ruling party describing Nitin Gadkari as a “pygmy in politics” and an “RSS puppet”. They also suggest that ears needed to be pulled by senior party leaders LK Advani and Sushma Swaraj for his anti-Sonia Gandhi remarks.

The Congress-BJP war of words escalated on Thursday with the ruling party describing Nitin Gadkari as a “pygmy in politics” and an “RSS puppet”. They also suggest that ears needed to be pulled by senior party leaders LK Advani and Sushma Swaraj for his anti-Sonia Gandhi remarks.

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Even as the Congress renewed its demand for an apology from the BJP leader who, it alleged, had reduced political discourse to ‘gutter level’, senior leader Digvijaya Singh demanded that Gadkari declare his I-T return. Singh said Gadkari, who never contested an election, had amassed thousands of crores of wealth.

While law minister Veerappa Moily dismissed Gadkari as a “pygmy”, spokesperson Jayanti Natarajan stressed that “If the RSS withdraws support to him, he will be consigned to the dustbin of history and politics.’’

The BJP leader, she charged, had no control over factionalism and disputes in the party where the chief ministers are “fascists and little despots” in their own states and were blackmailing their chief.

The fresh attack came in the backdrop of Gadkari’s remarks that Sonia’s Congress is more ‘badnam’ that the Munni in a film song and her will to battle corruption is akin to Pakistan’s claim to root out terrorism.

Questioning his “moral authority” to talk about corruption, the Congress said he should first look at allegations of graft in Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh or Chhattisgarh.

Meanwhile, senior leader Janardan Dwivedi dismissed as “totally baseless” the BJP’s charge that home minister P Chidambaram had played a role 2G spectrum scam.