PM’s Criticism of Others' Culinary Culture, a Cheap Politics: Stalin

Chennai: Calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s criticism of other people’s culinary culture as ‘cheap politics,’ Chief Minister M K Stalin launched a virulent attack on the BJP telling the people that the present Lok Sabha election were different as they would decide if India should continue as a democracy or a dictatorship and if it should follow the Constitution framed by B R Ambedkar or let it be replaced with laws written by the RSS.

Speaking at an election meeting in Manjapakkam in Tiruvallur district on Monday, seeking votes for Congress candidate Sashikanth Senthil from Thiruvallur constituency and DMK’s Kalanidhi Veerasamy from North Chennai, Stalin said the election results would also decide if Reservation would continue in the country and if people of all religions would live in peace and communal amity.

Targeting Modi for his alleged blatant lies, the Chief Minister said that while he did not release a single rupee for the next phase of the Metro Rail project in Chennai despite his repeated entreaties he was now saying that he gave Rs 63,246 crore.

Similarly, he listed the other alleged lies of Modi on the Sagarmala scheme and AIIMS at Madurai. Stalin asked the members of the fishermen community who were present in large numbers at the meeting if they saw any work being done on the Sagarma Scheme and pointed out that the Prime Minister had lied that Rs two lakh crore had been spent on it.

Also pointing out the AIIMS Madurai project was in limbo for many years, he alleged that Modi had claimed to have spent Rs 1960 crore on it as he had been lying on each and everything as he had nothing to mention about the achievements of his government in the past 10 years.

He told the voters that the reason why they should defeat the BJP was because the laws brought in by him at night needed to be changed. Modi had appeared one night on television to announce the introduction of demonetization that brought suffering to a wide range of people, he said.

In the same manner, the GST that had ruined many industries and forced many people to end their lives by suicide was also enforced one night and it needed to be changed now with the introduction of a new tax regime, which the Congress had promised to do in its election manifesto, he said.

Talking about the Congress manifesto, he said many of the DMK’s policies and aspirations resonate in it like the abolition of NEET, Rs one lakh assistance to women every year, removal of the 50 per cent ceiling on reservation, 50 per cent quota for women in Central government services, a nation-wide caste census, among others.

Expressing regret over the Prime Minister terming the Congress manifesto as a Muslim League manifesto, he said that no one, including Modi had the right to decided what people should eat and accused the Prime Minister of playing cheap politics.

If the DMK manifesto was a hero, the BJP’s manifesto was a villain as it threatened to bring in the Common Civil Code that would divide the nation on communal lines. There was also a lot of hanky panky in the manifesto that had passages like the reducing the price of sanitary napkin ‘copy pasted’ from the 2019 manifesto.

In that context, he said that the BJP government had levied GST on sanitary pads, leading to their price shooting and it was brought down only after the opposition MPs intervened and fought for the removal of GST.

Of the 14 Prime Ministers the country had since Jawaharlal Nehru, no one had misused the triumvirate of ED, I-T and CBI to intimidate the opposition parties and engineering defections from their ranks, to buy MPs and MLAs and to arrest Chief Ministers, to force industrialists to buy electoral bonds and to collect funds for the private trust called PMCare.

He also accused the AIADMK general secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami of pledging the State’s rights to the BJP and also letting loose the police on those, including Stalin and other leaders of various parties, who took part in the protest against the CAA. Thus Palaniswami made the AIADMK, a B team of the BJP, he said.