BJP brings back 'potato factories' to slam Rahul Gandhi, asks how can he talk about farmers

As the Gujarat elections date nears, the BJP is sharpening its attack against the Congress. The ruling party launched a scathing attack on Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi and his recent pro-farmer stance.

BJP’s Kisan Morcha chief Virendra Singh said that Gandhi was "ancestrally" anti-farmer.

“While Bardoli peasant leader Sardar Patel was busy securing the integrity of India post-independence, Jawaharlal Nehru was busy writing love letters to Lady Mountbatten and signing documents of the Partition. While BJP leaders go to the fields after Parliamentary sessions, Rahul Gandhi retreats to his romantic escapades,” the MP said.

He appealed to the peasants of the poll-bound state not to be misled by Gandhi “whose family had dishonoured Gujarat and such of its icons as Sardar Patel and Mahatma Gandhi."

“While Gandhi wanted to preserve the nation's villages, pro-foreigner and pro-urban Nehru and Indira Gandhi were busy destroying that vision,” Singh added.

The peasant leader from UP also said that a crack team of Kisan Morcha, to be called ‘Kisan Sena’, would be launching an all out campaign in Gujarat from November 20 to demolish the “lies being spread by Rahul Gandhi” and to take the pro-farmer schemes of the Narendra Modi government to the farmers.

Invoking history, Singh said that while Nehru did not let Sardar Patel become the Prime Minister, his daughter Indira Gandhi did the same to Morarji Desai.

“The Congress party has always dishonoured Gujarat and its icons. It was also from Gujarat that the first voices of protest against Indira’s Emergency came under the leadership of Jayprakash Narayan and Morarji. They were both incarcerated for 19 months,” Singh said.

Citing that PM Modi came from a humble background and that he too was hounded by the Congress government at Centre when he was the state’s chief minister, Singh said political-social activist Amit Shah was put in jail for two years.

“How can Rahul even talk of the farmers of India. His father had appealed the farmers to sow jaggery in fields meant for sugarcane farming while he talks about potato factories.”

The senior BJP leader said that while the Modi government was the first ever in history to have allocated 42 per cent of the budget towards the farm sector and farmers’ welfare, the Congress governments had not allocated even half that amount.