New Delhi:
Dr Manmohan Singh, unusually aggressive, made a focused attack on the BJP in Parliament today, beginning with economics and data as he is wont to do, and then shifting gears midway to politics.
The Prime Minister referred to the BJP's Delhi meet last weekend where leaders like Narendra Modi had attacked him, saying that they had hurled the "choicest abuses" against the Congress leadership, but that he would not use "the language that the BJP uses to attack us", defending his government's economic policies and asserting that the UPA's performance in the last decade would compel people to vote them back.
In effect, he declared election season 2014 open. The treasury benches thumped desks in approval.
"The BJP fielded an iron man who said Manmohan Singh is the weakest PM. We all know what happened. People will repeat the same fate," Dr Singh said, referring to the BJP's campaign around the leadership of LK Advani in the 2009 General Elections. The BJP-led NDA had focused its arsenal on attacking Dr Singh's leadership in that election - the UPA came back to power.
The PM drew number-heavy comparisons between the years of NDA rule that preceded his first government in 2004 and the achievements of the UPA. "The best I can do is to compare nine years of UPA with six years of NDA, people can compare and decide what has been done. Our average growth rate in these nine years has been 9 %, during the NDA tenure growth was no more than 6%", he said.
The BJP's 'India Shining' campaign had been "a disaster," Dr Singh said in a speech that he peppered with an Urdu couplet and a Hindi adage. (
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