Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday, in a pre-poll prediction, said the Congress party is akin to Titanic ship that will bring doom to those who associate with it.
“The Congress is like the Titanic ship, which is sinking with every passing day. Whoever has boarded this ship is either drowning like the NCP (the Nationalist Congress Party) or leaving the ship,” said PM Modi at a poll rally in Nanded.
The Nanded Lok Sabha seat, which goes to the polls on April 18 in the second phase of the national election, has been a Congress stronghold since 1952. The party has lost this seat only four times in 1957, 1977, 1989 and 2004. The BJP won this seat only once in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls.
In this bastion of the Congress, the prime minister said that the principal Opposition party is a divided house in Maharashtra. He said, “The Congress has become so weak in Maharashtra that there are more camps in the party than there are legislators (MLAs). These camps are constantly fighting.”
On the recently released Congress manifesto for the polls, PM Modi said the Congress views the middle-class as its enemy.
“The Congress has made it clear that it considers the middle-class as greedy and selfish. This is the reason why it is planning to increase tax burden on the middle-class. The Congress has not mentioned the word ‘middle-class’ even once. You need to be beware of the Congress party,” PM Modi said.
This was in reference to the Congress’s poll promise of rolling out the Nyuntam Aay Yojana or NYAY providing cash support to poorest 5 crore families in the country. The BJP has alleged that the Congress is planning to raise taxes on the middle-class to fund its minimum income guarantee scheme if it is voted to power in the elections.
On another promise made in the Congress manifesto, PM Modi said the party wants to have “two prime ministers in the country, one in Delhi and the other in Jammu and Kashmir”. He alleged that the Congress will remove AFSPA (the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) from Jammu and Kashmir to weaken the security forces fighting terrorists in the Valley. “The armed forces will be implicated in false cases,” PM Modi said.
