Dehra Dun/New Delhi: Taunting the Congress over the delay in hanging Afzal Guru, BJP President Nitin Gadkari asked the party whether the Parliament attack convict was its "son-in-law".
In comments that could stoke a controversy, Gadkari thundered at a BJP rally in Dehra Dun Thursday night, "Is Afzal Guru the son-in-law of Congress? Have you (Congress) given your daughter to the Afzal. Why is he being given special treatment?"
Gadkari made a reference to the Afzal Guru issue while slamming the Congress and the UPA for the delay in the hanging of the death row convict, bringing the focus back on the Afzal case file.
Reacting to Gadkari's comments, Congress said Gadkari has lost his mind and sarcastically said he needed serious help.
"The remark smacks of obscenity, obnoxiousness and obtuseness," Congress spokesman Manish Tewari said in New Delhi.
Tewari further said, "it is very obvious that the esteemed president of the BJP has lost it completely. The BJP should take pity on him and deposit him into a psychiatric facility. The man needs serious help."
Targeting Congress, Gadkari said, "It (Congress) is a party full of fearful people. They can never fight with terrorists and can never get rid of terrorism. It is a party which will bow down in front of terrorists and can never protect India."
The Supreme Court upheld Afzal's death penalty in 2005. Since then, the Opposition has attacked the Congress for delaying his hanging, saying if Afzal is not hanged India will be seen as a soft state. Afzal is on death row for over eight years after he was convicted of masterminding the December 13, 2001 attack on Parliament.
Four years after its opinion was sought, the Sheila Dikshit government in Delhi finally gave its opinion to Lieutenant Governor Tejinder Khanna recently saying that it supports the Supreme Court's decision to give death sentence to Afzal Guru, but added a rider saying that the implications of the execution must be taken into consideration.
Within hours of this, Khanna returned the file asking the Delhi government's stand on Afzal's mercy petition. The Delhi government sent back Afzal's file saying that it stood by the Supreme Court verdict.
"I used to paste posters of BJP in a village of Maharashtra and now I have become the national President of the party. This can happen only in BJP because it is still a party with a difference," Gadkari said addressing the party's 'Janakrosh' rally in Dehra Dun.
Such a 'phenomenal' rise of an ordinary worker cannot happen in Congress which is still plagued by dynastic rule, he said and threw a challenge to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and other senior Congress leaders to try and head their party.
"Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Union Home Minister P Chidambaram and Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee can never dream of becoming the President of the Congress as the post is reserved for Nehru-Gandhi family," he said.
Gadkari claimed that BJP is still a party with a difference while "Congress is a private limited firm."
"In true sense the internal democracy today exists only in BJP and I am proud to be associated with it," he said. He said he is just an ordinary worker and was merely trying to hold the responsibility of a captain.
"A captain is successful only when all the members of the team play well with full force," he said. Gadkari also accused the UPA of not doing anything on the issue of Chinese intrusion into India.
In this regard, he said he constituted a high-level party team which recently visited the border areas along China where they found incidents of several Chinese intrusion.
Similarly, he said Bangladeshis are intruding into the country from Assam side and the government despite being aware of this is sleeping over the issue as it looks upon them as a vote bank.
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