Congress leader, who landed in controversies with provocative comments, Sunday admitted for the first time that party chief Sonia Gandhi had ticked him off when he criticised P Chidambaram last year for his anti-Maoist strategy.
Congress leader Digvijay Singh, who landed in controversies with provocative comments, Sunday admitted for the first time that party chief Sonia Gandhi had ticked him off when he criticised Home Minister P Chidambaram last year for his anti-Maoist strategy.
The "only gag" on me was after I wrote a piece on Chidambaram. "She (Gandhi) did tick me off and I went and apologised to Chidambaram," Singh told Karan Thapar on CNN-IBN.
Singh sparked a controversy by calling Chidambaram "intellectually arrogant" and said his approach on the Maoist issue was a "narrow sectarian view, treating it as a purely law and order problem".
About his controversial statements bringing Rahul Gandhi a bad name as he is his advisor, the AICC General Secretary said, "Absolutely wrong. I am neither an advisor nor a mentor to Rahul Gandhiji."
Persistently asked about the issue, Singh said, "Who has said that I am a mentor to Rahul Gandhiji. No one in my party has said this to me."
Seeking to blunt allegations that he was communalising terror, Singh said he was not doing so and suggested that it was senior BJP leader LK Advani and his party who should be blamed for this if it was so.
"People who have communalised this first of all is people like LK Advani who went to the Prime Minister with a delegation when the ATS Maharashtra arrested Sreekant Purohit, Pragya Thakur and Dayanand Pandey and others in the Malegaon blast. BJP went in a delegation to the Prime Minister. Are they not communalising the issue?" he shot back when asked about the allegations.
Referring to four incidents in Mhow, Nanded and Kanpur allegedly involving right wing Hindu extremists, Singh repeated his charge that RSS has been involved in training people to make bombs.
He clarified that he never said RSS is a bomb-making factory. He had said that it is training people to make bombs, the Congress general secretary contended.
Singh also said that he has evidence of RSS involvement in terror activities and he has given it to a court in Gwalior.
Singh alleged that he was "misquoted" by media when he made remarks on recent Mumbai blasts and said he never stated that involvement of Hindu outfit should be investigated.
"I am being misquoted and quoted out of context. I am being targeted unfortunately," he said.
Maintaining that he has always put the "communal Hindu and communal Muslim" on the same footing, Singh said as a chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, he had always taken action against communal Hindu organisations and communal Muslim organisations.
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