Senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram has said the Congress has proposed to stall Parliamentary proceedings during the ensuing monsoon session until Prime Minister Narendra Modi broke his silence on the Lalit Modi issue and Vyapam scam.
Accusing Mr. Modi of maintaining a stoic silence over the two issues while talking about everything under the sun, Mr. Chidambaram said “we will allow no business to take place when Parliament meets for the monsoon session if the Prime Minister failed to break his silence.”
Describing the Vyapam scam as the biggest scandal independent India had ever witnessed, the former Union Finance Minister said 47 people, who were either witnesses or tried to expose the scam have died, many mysteriously. But the Prime Minister has remained silent.
Those died included a Medical College Dean who was preparing the list of fraudulent admissions and a young television journalist recently and this could happen only in a barbaric rule, he said and ridiculed Mr. Modi for the sorry state of affairs. After a gap of five years, the Supreme Court had ordered a CBI probe into the scam and how truth would come out was anybody’s guess, he said addressing a public meeting here on Saturday.
When the Opposition was seeking the resignations of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje over the Lalit Modi controversy and Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan over Vyapam scam, the Prime Minister ‘is in deep silence.’
He said Mr. Modi came to power promising “Achhe din aane waale hain’ but it turned out to be ‘Achhe din’ only for Mr. Modi. A sense of fear pervaded among the Dalits and minorities and they lived under constant fear. A majority of the people felt that the BJP government was anti-people and it belonged to the capitalists, fraudsters and gamblers in the stock market,” he charged.
‘Only for Hindi-speaking people’
In Tiruchi, addressing party delegates’ conference of the Tiruchi District (south) Congress Committee at Vayalur on Saturday, Mr. Chidambaram said that Mr. Modi was acting as if he was a Prime Minister only for the Hindi-speaking people in the country.
The Prime Minister had so far visited about 21 countries since the BJP assumed power. He could not be faulted for making foreign visits, as he was supposed to undertake overseas visits in his capacity as Prime Minister.
“But how many visits has he made to Southern States? He has almost forgotten Tamil Nadu. The heat wave and floods claimed several lives in Andhra Pradesh and Assam recently. But, Mr.Modi has not bothered to visit the affected areas,” he said.
Additional inputs from C. Jaisankar in Tiruchi
