'PM Narendra Modi Forgot He is India's Prime Minister, Not BJP's': AAP's Kumar Vishwas to NDTV

New Delhi:

"PM Modi forgot he is India's prime minister and behaved like an opposition leader during the campaign," said Kumar Vishwas, a top leader of Arvind Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), the morning after his party's spectacular victory in Delhi.

Mr Vishwas, a poet-turned-politician and a major crowd puller for the party, has in the past praised the Prime Minister on different occasions. He admits to having received an offer from the BJP to join them last year, an offer he declined.

Explaining why the party decided to invite the PM to Mr Kejriwal's swearing in on Saturday despite the acrimonious campaign, Kumar Vishwas called it "basic courtesy", one he says the Prime Minister failed to accord Arvind Kejriwal while campaigning.

"If a prime minister says about his own countryman that he is a Naxal, people won't accept it. Those who admire PM Modi, they did not like it," Mr Vishwas said.

But the AAP leader asserted that his party would not be defined by anti-Modi politics.

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"We want to stop corruption, not Modi," he said, commenting on the support offered by the BJP's critics like Mamata Banerjee and Nitish Kumar.

"Mamata's support for us does not mean that we will endorse the sort of politics that we are seeing in Bengal today."
BJP ally Uddhav Thackeray was among those who took the Delhi verdict to criticize PM Modi.

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On whether AAP could be part of an "anti-Modi front", Mr Vishwas said, "Not at all. Our agenda is anti-corruption. We have no personal grouse with Modi."