Rahul targets BJP over Modi's 'status'

Raking up the issue of Narendra Modi’s marital status to attack the BJP, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Friday said it took several elections for the party’s prime ministerial candidate to admit he was married.

“Don’t know how many elections he has contested till now, but he has revealed for the first time that he is married. In Delhi, he talks about honour of women, but his own wife’s name doesn’t reach the affidavit,” Gandhi said, while addressing an election rally in support of party candidate and Union Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad in the hilly Doda district of Jammu and Kashmir.

The remarks came a day after a controversy erupted over Modi declaring himself as a married man for the first time, in an affidavit filed before the Election Commission along with his nomination papers for the Vadodara Lok Sabha seat.

Continuing his tirade against the BJP and its leadership, the Gandhi scion said the party’s ministers in Karnataka were caught watching videos in the state assembly. “What kind of videos, you would have read in the newspapers,” he said, apparently referring to an episode during the BJP’s tenure in Karnataka when ministers were caught on TV allegedly watching porn clips in the state assembly.

The Congress vice-president also claimed that he had gone to Chhattisgarh where he had been told that 20,000 women were missing. “They (Raman Singh-led BJP government) don’t know where they went, they are missing,” he said.

Gandhi said, “I read a poster of the BJP, which claimed they respect women which is good. But in Gujarat, the entire state machinery is used to track the movement of one lady,” he said, adding, “And her (the lady’s) phone gets tapped because the chief minister wants it.”

“What kind of respect do they have for women?” he asked, while referring to the controversy in which two investigative news websites made public tapes in which Modi’s aide Amit Shah was purportedly heard directing the police to put a young woman and a senior IAS officer under surveillance in 2009.