NEW DELHI:
Congress
leader
P Chidambaram
on Thursday rejected to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim that the grand old party had devised a scheme to allocate 15% of the Union Budget solely for the
Muslims
, terming the accusation as “increasingly bizarre, false & outrageous.”
Responding to the PM’s allegation that the Congress attempts to “appease its votebank” by dividing the budget into a “Muslim budget” and a “Hindu budget”, the former Union minister took to X on Thursday and accused
PM Modi
of hypocrisy, pointing out to the PM’s claim that if he “played the Hindu-Muslim divide, he would not be fit to be in public life but the very next day.”
“He played his usual game of dividing Hindus and Muslims,” he said.
“Prime Minister’s statements are increasingly bizarre and show that his speech writers have lost their balance,” the Congress leader said in a post on X.
“The honorable PM’s accusation that Manmohan Singh had drawn up a plan to spend 15 per cent of the Union Budget exclusively on Muslims is totally false. His further allegation that Congress will present a Muslim budget and a Hindu budget is so outrageous that it can be only characterised as a hallucination,” the former finance minister said.
Chidambaram said that it is his “fervent hope” that in the coming days of the election campaign, PM Modi would “abandon the path of false accusations and outrageous claims”.
He mentioned that people worldwide are closely following the events and the Prime Minister’s statements do not reflect well on India on the global stage.
“Not only the Indian people, the world is watching and analysing the Indian prime minister’s statements, and they do not bring glory to India’, he said.
The comment made by the former Union minister after the Prime Minister has intensified the attack against Congress. During an election rally at Pimpalgaon Baswant in the north Maharashtra’s Nashik district on Wednesday, the Prime Minister accused Congress of misusing funds by allocating 15 per cent of the government budget for Muslims. He also promised to prevent the division of the budget and the implementation of reservation in jobs and education based on religion.
Splitting the budget on religious lines was dangerous, Modi said.
