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‘Reading a script’, ‘shameful’: How BJP, Congress reacted to Amit Shah vs Rahul Gandhi showdown in Lok Sabha
Congress leader Supriya Shrinate expressed her concerns with Amit Shah's speech and said he read out a “passages from WhatsApp University”.
Lok Sabha witnessed a showdown on Wednesday between leader of opposition in the lower house Rahul Gandhi and home minister Amit Shah as discussions over electoral reforms spiralled into a heated exchange and chaos.
While Shah defended the special intensive revision of electoral reforms as necessary to weed out undocumented migrants from the voter rolls, Rahul Gandhi challenged him to debate on his press conference about ‘vote theft’ allegations.
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‘Reading a script, WhatsApp University’
Not satisfied with Amit Shah's response to Opposition's concerns and allegations, Congress leader and MP Gaurav Gogoi said he thinks Shah was “given a script” and refused to did not answer issues raised by leaders including Rahul Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, Kalyan Banerjee, Supriya Sule and others.
“We thought the Home Minister would answer the questions of the opposition that we raised in the last 2 days of discussion. I think he was given a script, and he kept reading according to the script,” Gogoi said.
“He said the Congress party never went to the Election Commission, but the truth is that our party leaders have had press conferences so many times outside the Election Commission, we have registered complaints so many times,” he added before questioning why did the home minister not see the “polluted” voter list during Lok Sabha polls.
“He said that the voter list is polluted, but did he not see the voter list when they were dreaming of 400 paar?” he said.
Also read: ‘Detect, delete, deport’: Shah defends SIR in LS| Watch
Congress leader Supriya Shrinate also expressed her concerns with Shah's speech and said he read out a “passages from WhatsApp University”.
“Amit Shah ji was talking about infiltrators. I want to ask: SIR has been done in Bihar, how many infiltrators were caught? If infiltrators are in the country, then this is your failure; you should resign,” Shritnate said, before claiming that during the UPA regime, between 2004 and 2014, over 88,000 infiltrators were removed from India while in the last 11 years of the NDA government, only 2,400 people have been removed.
While reacting to Shah's speech, Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra said that someone who's blameless doesn't give such a lengthy explanation.
‘Utterly shameful’
During Shah's speech, the house erupted into chaos as the Opposition staged a walkout, a gesture that did not sit well with NDA MPs. BJP MP Tejasvi Surya said that it was “utterly shameful” that Rahul Gandhi led the Opposition and walked out while the Home Minister “was giving answers to each of his questions”.
While talking about how discussions on SIR have dominated Parliament proceedings for a while now, Surya said, “This SIR drama has gone on for a very long time in this country. In the last few years, the opposition has kept lying incessantly about this SIR and the EVM drama. The last parliament session was washed out because they were demanding a debate on SIR. The first two days of this session were again disrupted because they were demanding a debate on SIR, and just as when the Home Minister was answering each of the questions that they had posed, they did not even display the basic patience, the courtesy, the conviction to stay and listen to the answers."
Lauding Shah for his speech, BJP leader and Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma wrote on X, “Adarniya @AmitShah Ji has taken the Opposition and its propaganda on SIR to the cleaners”.
Earlier, Prime Minister Narendra Modi also praised Shah's speech as “outstanding”. “With concrete facts, he has highlighted diverse aspects of our electoral process, the strength of our democracy and also exposed the lies of the Opposition,” Modi wrote on X.
Union minister Piyush Goyal also defended SIR and said that voter list is being made “transparent and clean” through the exercise and that the opposition staged a walkout due to objections to this.
“Today, they exposed their true colours to the nation. The Home Minister was right when he said that the way the opposition is acting, the way the Congress and its allies—TMC, Samajwadi Party, and DMK—walk out over infiltrator votes, shows that they lack public support. They lack public votes, they lack popularity among the people, but they possess popularity among infiltrators, and they cannot benefit this country by winning elections based on infiltration. The people of Bihar have proven this to be true...” said Goyal.
(With PTI, ANI inputs)
