Maharashtra Congress chief Patole: ‘If calling Nirav Modi and Lalit Modi thieves is a mistake, then Congress will repeat it in future’

Maharashtra Congress chief Nana Patole lashied out at the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the disqualification of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi from the Lok Sabha.

Lashing out at the Bharatiya Janata Party and Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the disqualification of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi from the Lok Sabha, Maharashtra Congress chief Nana Patole on Sunday said that if Mr. Gandhi’s statement calling fugitive businessmen and economic offenders Nirav Modi and Lalit Modi “thieves” was a mistake, then the Congress would repeatedly commit the same offence in future as well.

Wearing black armbands, Maharashtra Congress leaders today staged a ‘satyagraha’ in protest of Mr. Gandhi’s disqualification from the Lok Sabha across the State.

Spearheading the protest in Nagpur, Mr. Patole accused the BJP and PM Modi of being scared that Mr. Gandhi would expose the links between the Prime Minister and industrialist Gautam Adani.

“Rahul Gandhi has acted as the voice of the people in questioning Mr. Adani’s ill-gotten gains and the links between him and the PM. So, what was the need for Mr. Modi to overreact when the Congress posed certain questions instead of clearing his stance? Our satyagraha today is to protest the conspiracy hatched by the BJP against Mr. Gandhi,” said Mr. Patole.

Refuting the BJP’s charge that Mr. Gandhi had insulted the OBC Modi community as “bizarre”, the Congress leader said that Mr. Gandhi had called Nirav Modi and Lalit Modi as thieves after they had been declared economic offenders by central agencies for misappropriating public money.

“And why should Rahul Gandhi apologise? In fact, it is the BJP that should apologise to the public for securing votes with their shallow promises and now trying to throttle democracy by suspending Mr. Gandhi. If the BJP does not believe in democracy, it should make it clear to the public given that the law today is applicable only for the Opposition and not the BJP,” he said.

Mocking the BJP, senior Congress leader from Vidarbha, Vijay Wadettiwar said that if the ruling party thought that Mr. Gandhi’s ‘insult’ of the fugitive exiles was an insult to the OBC community, then Nirav Modi and Lalit Modi were “very big leaders of OBCs” in view of the BJP.