Bhopal: The Bharatiya Janata Party’s firebrand leader, Uma Bharti, has called herself a real Gandhian, while launching an attack on the Gandhi family over their surname.
Addressing an election rally in Bhopal, Bharti said, “The Mughals left, then the British left, but they left the Congress behind for us.”
She said those who used the Gandhi surname these days were fake and only the one used by the Mahatma was original.
“The one family using the Gandhi surname was doing so for advantage as Nehru or Vadra surnames would not fetch them similar benefits. I am the original Gandhian,” said the former Madhya Pradesh chief minister.
She said Congress president Rahul Gandhi and party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi would lose all the fanfare once the general election came to an end.
Stating that her party could be liberal when religion was in question, but not when it concerned the nation, Bharti said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had given citizens enough reasons to feel proud as an Indian. She said Modi had earned a global repute for the country.
Referring to the Election Commission ban on the BJP’s Bhopal candidate, Pragya Singh Thakur, Bharti said, “We are followers of lord Ram, so we would follow the EC directives.”
“I was introduced to ‘Pragya-didi-ma’ during the 1999 election,” said Bharti, who had successfully contested the Lok Sabha election from Bhopal that year.
“When Thakur was named in the Malegaon blasts, I had claimed that she couldn’t do such a thing as I knew her personally. She had to undergo unbearable torture while in custody and forced to reveal names of BJP leaders, I was not even allowed to meet her,” the former chief minister said.
Claiming that the Congress government had framed Thakur in the Malegaon blasts case and let off the real culprits, Bharti said ‘saffron terror’ was a term coined to malign the image of Hindutva.
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