Breaking his silence over Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s “suit-boot ki sarkar” jibe, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday said, “Suit-boot is definitely more acceptable than suitcase.”
“Suit-boot is definitely more acceptable than suitcase. After ruling for 60 years, the Congress has suddenly remembered the poor. People of this country have suffered and remained poor due to shortsighted policies of the Congress,” Modi told ANI in an interview.
Hitting out at the Congress, Modi said, “Did the coal and spectrum scandals or the CWG fiasco benefit the poorIJ Everyone knows who were the beneficiaries — some chosen industrialists and contractors.”
Modi also spoke about the controversy surrounding the ‘One-Rank, One-Pension’ (OROP) for ex-servicemen and said, “We are committed to OROP, but we are in consultation with defence personnel regarding the definition of OROP. Our Government is here for five years and we cannot do anything without consulting the people concerned. The dialogue is being actively pursued. There is no need to have any doubt on this.”
In a separate interview to The Tribune, the PM took a dig at Rahul, who recently warned of an agitation if OROP was not implemented soon, saying, “OROP for me is not a political programme. For 57 years, the jawans have been demanding OROP, but the past Governments did nothing. Those who were part of the then Governments must realise they don’t have the right to speak on this issue. They should be told this in their face.”
For his part, his Cabinet colleague Finance Minister Arun Jaitley too rejected the Gandhi scion’s charge reiterating that the NDA Government is actually a ‘soojh-boojh ki sarkar’.
Jaitley, in his interview to India TV, refuted the criticism that PM does not believe in consulting his cabinet colleagues and that he has concentrated all powers in his hands. Jaitley said Modi is “a hands-on Prime Minister who allows maximum consultation”.
When asked to comment on The Economist magazine describing Modi as “a one-man band”, Jaitley said, Modi can’t be compared with his predecessor Manmohan Singh who was portrayed as ‘ a PM in office but not in power’ by the same magazine.
Responding sharply to Rahul’s accusations that the NDA Government was trying to snatch farmers’ land and hand them over to big corporates because it had taken crores of rupees from them during election campaign, Jaitley charged that Rahul has not read either his own party’s land Acquisition Act nor NDA’s act. “His land act would have stopped the development of rural areas of this country. Even his own chief ministers like Bhupinder Singh Hooda of Haryana and Prithviraj Chauhan of Maharashtra opposed the act saying it will bring development of the country to a halt,” Jaitley said.
When asked to comment on Congress’s charge that PM Modi is busy with his foreign visits when farmers of the country are in distress, Jaitley pointed out that even Manmohan Singh had visited 17 countries in his first year of UPA-I regime.
