With BJP in the process of forming government in Maharashtra, Congress today took potshots at it, questioning whether it will ally with a "Nationalist Corrupt Party", a name given to NCP by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the campaigning. "We will wait to see whether the BJP chooses to ally with Nationalist Corrupt Party or a party, which extorts money (hafta) if we trust the words spoken for them by Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier," Congress spokesman Randeep Surjewala told a press conference here.
During campaigning, Modi had described NCP as the "Nationalist Corrupt Party". While talking about the party "which extorts money", Surjewala appeared to refer to Shiv Sena, with which BJP had parted ways ahead of the assembly polls. "We only hope that BJP will be able to form a clean government without elements engaged in extortion or corruption. We also hope that no national or state party will try to engineer defections," he said.
When pointed out that Congress had also resorted to defections to form a government in Haryana in 2009, the spokesperson claimed that the merger of five Haryana Janhit Congress members into Congress then was justified. "But any attempt to form a government through horse trading in Maharashtra after the kind of mandate that has been delivered there does not fit any benchmark. "We will leave it to the wisdom of Modi and BJP President Amit Shah whether they choose to go with Naturally Corrupt Party or 'Hafta Wasool Party'," he said.
On Haryana, he said the state needs to be governed with caution and care and the BJP should fulfill the promises it made to the electorates there. "We will be very happy if they raise the old-age pension from Rs 1,000 to 2,000 as promised and gives unemployment allowance of Rs 15000 as promised." "We hope that the state government gets the required resource allocation from Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley," he said. As far as Congress is concerned, the mandate for it is clearly to sit in Opposition, the party spokesman said.
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