Shameful opposition is targetting PM who is 100 percent above board: Sonia Gandhi

NEW DELHI - Congress party President Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday accused the opposition of targeting Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh over the 2G spectrum scam, and described him as a man of integrity and a person ‘100 per cent above board’.

“It is shameful that the person of the Prime Minister’s integrity is being targeted. Everybody knows the Prime Minister is 100 per cent above board,” Gandhi told reporters here when asked about the attack of the opposition on Dr Singh.

Gandhi further said that the opposition should take a lesson from the results of the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, when they had targeted the Prime Minister then and he had won.

She said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had to pay a heavy price for attempting to ‘destroy the image’ of the Prime Minister.

Further attacking the BJP for retaining Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa, Gandhi said while her party had removed Natwar Singh, Shashi Tharoor and Ashok Chavan over allegations of corruption, the BJP had failed to take a similar step in the case of eddyurappa.

“This is a matter which the party concerned has to decide. As far as the Congress party is concerned, I think all of you know, you have all seen how we deal with matters of corruption. Starting from the issue of Volcker deal in which Natwar Singh was involved, we asked him to resign immediately and we set up a judicial inquiry,” said Gandhi.

“Shashi Tharoor, we asked him to resign…as soon as US President (Barack) Obama left, we asked him (the Maharastra Chief Minister to resign. It was planned before, but we did not want to execute it till the President left,” she added.

Gandhi said the people of the country could now judge which of the two parties is sincere in combating corruption.

“When we compare the action that our party takes with the action the other party takes, as you have mentioned the BJP in Karnataka, then I think it is for the people to judge, and I am confident that they will judge us more positively than other parties,” she said.

Describing corruption as a disease, Gandhi said an effective mechanism has to be found to deal with it.

She also congratulated the Nitish Kumar-led BJP alliance in Bihar for its clean sweep in Assembly polls and said that the verdict against the Congress indicated that the ‘party will have to start from scratch’ in the state.

“We did not have much hope. We took a deliberate decision not to work in alliance with other parties,” Gandhi said. (ANI)