NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said the ruling BJP-led NDA combine was headed for a historic win in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the Opposition INDIA bloc would disintegrate after the polls.
In an exclusive interview with The Tribune on the eve of the last and seventh phase of the 18th General Election on June 1, the Prime Minister talked about a range of issues, including his “ghuspethiye” (infiltrators) and “those with more children” remarks, saying these were never aimed at Muslims.
“When I say illegal infiltrators or people with more children, why are you assuming that I was referring to Muslims? When I question the Congress’ divisive policies that aim to appease Muslims, I am speaking against the Congress, not against Muslims,” he said, emphasising that speaking against appeasement politics was the most pro-Muslim stance one could take because the biggest victims of vote bank politics were Muslims themselves and they too had steadily begun to “see through the Congress game”.
The Prime Minister pledged the BJP’s commitment to bringing the Uniform Civil Code to its logical conclusion “in his third term” and singled the Congress out to say that the opposition party would “repeat its listless performance as in 2014 and 2019”.
For the BJP, PM Modi, running for a record third term in office, predicted significant gains in the south even as he termed the opposition alliance as “opportunistic and one without any vision or mission”.
“In Delhi, they say ‘hum saath saath hain’; in Punjab, they say ‘hum aapke hain kaun’,” said the Prime Minister, who listed lifting of 25 crore people out of poverty as the topmost national achievement in 10 years of NDA rule apart from the grant of basic amenities from toilets to gas connections to crores of deprived households.
In other important remarks, the Prime Minister cited the May 24 Calcutta High Court order cancelling OBC certificates granted to 77 communities by West Bengal’s Trinamool Congress government since 2010 to reiterate his accusation that the “Congress-led INDIA bloc had a track record of diluting SC/ST/OBC quota and giving it to the Muslims”.
The overwhelming majority of OBC certificates cancelled by the Calcutta HC were the ones awarded to Muslim communities, the Prime Minister pointed out, rejecting the Opposition’s charge that the BJP wanted 400-plus Lok Sabha seats to scrap constitutionally mandated quotas.
“We have been in power for 10 years with massive mandates, which helped us do things such as the abrogation of Article 370 which were thought to be impossible… A government that could take such big decisions could do anything it wanted. What did we do? We extended SC/ST/OBC reservations for more years,” the Prime Minister said ahead of the June 1 elections in eight states and UTs, including Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, UP, Bihar, Odisha, West Bengal and Jharkhand.
On the frequent Opposition refrain that central probe agencies were being used to target BJP’s political rivals, Modi said those claiming to be targeted were the ones from whom mountains of cash had been seized. “Yes, the corrupt are being targeted. The entire country saw heaps of cash recovered by the agencies, which shows that the ED and the CBI are on the right track,” said the Prime Minister.