AGENCIES / PUNE
Coming down heavily on at Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Chief Amit Shah, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) chief Sharad Pawar on Friday said Mr. Shah at his election rallies speaks less about vital issues afflicting the State and seems more concerned about making personal attacks on him.
“These days, with the poll temperature heating up, a gentleman from Gujarat [Mr. Shah] who has served jail terms in the past, is touring the State…Even though I am not contesting the elections, it is my name that seems to be perpetually on his lips,” Mr. Pawar said.
The NCP chief said while addressing a series of election meetings in Shirur and Daund in Pune district.
He accused the Union Home Minister of irrelevantly harping on the Modi government’s scrapping of Article 370 ahead of the Assembly polls as the BJP has nothing else on its agenda. “Mr. Shah, in his speeches, repeatedly demands that I give an explanation on why I did not support the BJP government’s withdrawal of Article 370… This is absurd. Have I done anything procedurally wrong in the Rajya Sabha?”
Mr. Pawar said Mr. Shah’s speeches had nothing on rising farmer suicides, declining growth rate, economic slowdown, and soaring unemployment. “Instead, he [Mr. Shah] keeps harping on how peaceful Kashmir has become while exhorting people to go and do farming there.”
Rejecting Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis’s claims that the BJP government had put Maharashtra once again on the country’s industrial map, he said it was during the Congress-NCP regime that the State saw industrial development.
“The economic slowdown is destroying livelihoods of scores of youth in the Pimpri-Chinchwad industrial area. The BJP government is responsible for this…their leaders utterly lack the capability to check this slowdown nor have any grasp of it.” The NCP chief addressed a series of meetings in Shirur and Daund in Pune district.