Baalu scathing attack on Narendra Modi

Chennai: Slamming Prime Minister Narendra Modi for misusing his official trip to Tamil Nadu to address BJP party meetings and pour out political vitriol against opposition parties, DMK treasurer and former Union Minister, T R Baalu said that it would have been nice if the Prime Minister had listed out what he had done to the State and to the nation in the past 10 years instead of being vituperative.

In a hard-hitting statement on Wednesday, Baalu responded to a wide range of things that Modi mentioned while addressing different public meetings in the State on Tuesday and Wednesday and one of them was the remark that former Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa provided a good government. Baalu reminded Modi that Jayalalithaa was the one who pulled the rug from under the previous BJP-led government of A B Vajpayee.

Jayalalithaa was convicted in a corruption case and had been stripped of her Chief Minister’s post twice following convictions by courts, he said and recalled Modi proclaiming from an election meeting at Hosur in 2016 that it was Jayalalithaa’s corruption that was impeding the State.

In Palladam on Tuesday, Modi made a volte facie and praised Jayalalithaa to the skies with a hope that it would fetch him votes in the Lok Sabha polls, he said and also reminded him that in 2014 Jayalalithaa had raised the question ‘Modi or Lady’ during the campaign throwing a challenge to his aspiration to be the Prime Minister after being the Chief Minister of Gujarat, Baalu said.

He said Modi was angry with the Chief Minister M K Stalin because the DMK had paved the way for the formation of the INDIA coalition that is all set to put up a fight against the man who thought that he was invincible but now felt the ground under him giving away.

Mocking at Modi’s allegation that the DMK government was blocking the information about the achievements of the Union Government, he wondered if he read the newspapers and listened to debates on televisions that were only brimming over with news about him.

On the charge that the Congress government did nothing for Tamil Nadu, he gave a long list of things that the State received then and told Modi to not exult over the appointment of L Murugan as union minister because during the UPA government several leaders from the State had served in the Union Cabinet.

Accusing Modi of not releasing the Rs 37,000 crore fund that was sought to mitigate the sufferings caused by the two natural disasters that struck the State in the form of floods in 2023 end, he told him that his dream of destroying the DMK would not come true.

Ever since the DMK was formed in 1947, people had been talking about decimating the party. Though such talks had been going on for 74 years it was those people who disappeared from the political scene while the DMK flourished, he said.