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Cong earns Naidu's wrath
Addressing an election rally, the BJP chief accused the Congress of using the minority population as vote bank and pushing the country towards disaster.
BJP president M Venkaiah Naidu on Sunday accused the Congress of using the minority population as vote bank and pushing the country towards disaster by creating insurgency problems in Jammu and Kashmir and Assam.
Addressing an election rally, Naidu claimed that the BJP was a secular party and never played any vote bank politics as the Congress.
"The very fact that the party is secular can be gauged by the fact that the country has a Muslim President and many other people from that community in several top posts," he said.
"The ULFA and militancy in Kashmir is a creation of the Congress for which it has no answer while the BJP has found out ways to contain it," he said.
Launching a scathing attack on the "misrule" of Congress, the BJP president, in the second leg of his election tour to the state, predicted that the party (Congress) will be "massacred" in this election and his party will get a minimum of 300 seats in Parliament.
"The Congress is asking everybody for support but from every quarter they have been discarded and they are totally shattered," Naidu said during his hour-long speech in Hindi which was heard by a crowd of about 10,000.
Listing the achievements of the NDA government, the BJP chief said the country had a record foreign exchange reserve besides building express highways resulting in an "unprecedented" overall development.
"What the congress failed to do in 50 years, we have achieved in five years," he said, adding that the new warmth in relationship with Pakistan was a direct result of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpyee's polcies.
"The ongoing cricket series and the warmth the Indians have received in Pakistan only goes to say that the country foreign policy was great which was never the case when the congress was in power," he said.
The BJP president also accused the Congress of failing to tap the huge natural resource present in the Northeast and said it had only used the states as "its vote bank".
"The BJP is a party which is against any kind of social discrimination and believes in education for all and empowerment of women," he said.
India has the potential to be a super power because of its rich civilisation and this has been only made possible by the dynamic policies of the NDA government, he said.
