Congress leader and Union Commerce Minister Anand Sharma today alleged that BJP is indulging in “political plagiarism”. Addressing a press conference in Mumbai, Sharma said that BJP simply “copy-pasted” the Congress manifesto in its vision document.
He also said that voters would keep “the personality cult and authoritarianism” out of power. “BJP manifesto talks of five 'T's — tradition, talent, tourism, technology and trade. It also speaks of creating new cities. There are four industrial corridors proposed. The Mumbai-Delhi corridor, which is in progress, is the second largest infrastructure project in the world,” Sharma said.
Hitting out at BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, Sharma said, “When Modi speaks, there is only hatred and anger. He also accused RSS and BJP of spending Rs 10,000 crore to make Modi the Prime Minister. Sharma however said that Congress was a little late in exposing Modi's “false Gujarat model of development projections”. He also countered BJP's argument that government should order a probe if it suspected that the party's campaign was excessively expensive, saying that Modi knew very well that a probe cannot be ordered during the elections, and therefore he was making such statements in his “fixed” media interviews.
The Union Minister alleged that 80 per cent of the hoardings, the advertising space in the national and regional dailies and airtime on TV and radio channels had been bought by the BJP “for one person”. The party is not showing this expenditure to the Election Commission. Sharma also said that an election campaign of this magnitude was unprecedented in the country's history.
He defended UPA's economic record by saying that “it's only in the last two years that there has been an economic slowdown. But countries across the world have yet to revive after the global meltdown of 2008”. Dismissing “the Gujarat model”, Sharma said as per the RBI data, of the USD 305 billion of Foreign Direct Investment, Maharashtra had received the highest USD 64 billion, while Gujarat was at number 5 with USD 9 billion investment.
