Sushil Kumar Shinde’s comments show his frustration: Uddhav Thackeray

Reacting to Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde's remark that the people of the country would eventually forget coal scam with the passage of time as they did with Bofors issue years ago, Shiv Sena’s executive president Uddhav Thackeray said on Sunday said the comment depicted his own frustration on Congress party.

Interacting with media on the sidelines of the protest march that he led against the recent hike in diesel prices, Thackeray termed Shinde’s comments “condemnable,” adding that it reflects Congress’ mentality.

“The remark by Sushil Kumar Shinde is condemnable, but I believe it shows the mentality of the Congress party. The Congress party continues to torture the public by increasing prices, they consume the money of the country in one scam after another but when elections come, the public forgets everything and vote them to power. I think Sushil Kumar Shinde himself is very frustrated with the Congress party,” Thackeray said.

Shinde had, on Saturday, said that Bofors was a talking point earlier, but people forgot about it later.

“Earlier the Bofors scam was the hot debate all over the country. Later people forgot it. Now it is coal. This too will be forgotten. Once hands are washed off coal, they again become clean,” he added during an interaction in Pune.

The Congress-led UPA government is at the moment embroiled in a series of scams, the most notably being the coal blocks allocation scam.

The BJP-led opposition disrupted the proceedings in the monsoon session of Parliament and deprived the government from putting forth its views on the issue.

The coal scandal dominated the monsoon session of Parliament after the CAG report said that the under-priced sales of coalfields would have cost the national exchequer as much as 33 billion dollars in lost revenues.