Criticising the Congress over its leader Rahul Gandhi terming Prime Minister Narendra Modi a “vote chor”, senior BJP leader and former MP GVL Narasimha Rao on Friday questioned that will the grand old party call all political parties and the leaders who caused vote loss to it as “vote chors”.
Terming Gandhi’s allegations against PM Modi as” false and fraudulent”, Rao said the Congress declined from its peak performance– from securing 404 seats in the Lok Sabha in 1984 to merely 44 seats in 2014.
“The recent efforts by the Congress party to blame the BJP and the Prime Minister for its bad performance in successive elections are an attempt to project that Congress’ votes declined after Narendra Modi took over as Prime Minister. These are completely false and fraudulent allegations,” Rao said, adding that this required some amount of authentic data to show that what Rahul Gandhi has claimed is completely fake.
“…so, I looked at election trends and results from 1984 until Modi became the PM in 2014. The results are very startling. Congress declined from its peak performance of 404 seats in 1984 to merely 44 seats in 2014,” the BJP leader added.
“Congress’ votes came down from 49.1 per cent to 19.5 per cent in 2014. Congress party has to look somewhere else if they want to call someone a vote chor who took away its votes,” he asserted.
The first person, he said, who caused massive vote loss to the Congress party is former Prime Minister VP Singh.
“…would Rahul Gandhi dare to call him ‘Vote Chor’? Then several leaders across different states, be it Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati in UP, Lalu Prasad in Bihar, Stalin and Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu, Jyoti Basu and Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal – all of them have wiped the Congress off the political map of their respective states,” he said.
On August 7, Rahul Gandhi, in a press conference, presented some documents, facts and figures accusing the ruling BJP of indulging in vote theft by getting the false voters’ names included in the electors’ list in several states.
Ever since, the Congress MP, who is also the leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha, has been, every-now-and-then calling the BJP a “vote chor”, and alleging that PM Modi had become Prime Minister by indulging in corrupt practice.
Gandhi, in the press conference, also levelled serious allegations against the Election Commission of India (ECI), and accused it of being directly involved in the large-scale vote fraud.