Rahul Gandhi took jibes at Prime Minister Narendra Modi over the central government’s decision to make public the 2016 surgical strikes.
The 48-year-old Gandhi made the remarks while addressing Congress supporters at a public meeting in Udaipur in poll-bound Rajasthan with other senior party leaders in attendance.
Gandhi said that three surgical strikes were conducted during former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s tenure but all of them were kept secret for military reasons.
“Do you know that like Mr Narendra Modi’s surgical strike, Manmohan Singh ji did that 3 times? When Army came to Mr Manmohan Singh and said we need to retaliate against Pak for what they’ve done, they also said we wanted to be secret, for our own purposes,” Gandhi was quoted as saying by ANI.
Accusing the PM of using the surgical strike for political purposes, Gandhi said that Modi “reached into Army’s domain and shaped their surgical strike, turning it into a political asset when it actually was a military decision.”
The Congress president alleged that the PM used the successful surgical strike to help the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) during elections in key states.
“What the Army would have liked was we’ll do it, it’s beneficial if nobody knows we did it. But Modi didn’t want that. He was fighting an election in Uttar Pradesh and he was losing it. So he did it to turn a military asset into a political asset,” said Gandhi referring to the assembly elections held in 2017 which brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in India’s most populous state.
Mocking Modi, Gandhi said, “The PM is convinced he knows better than Army what needs to be done in Army’s area, better than Foreign Minister what needs to be done in Foreign Ministry, better than Agriculture Minister what needs to be done in agriculture because he has a sense that all knowledge comes from his brain.”
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