KCR shows strength, attacks Modi

Srinivasa Rao Apparasu

HYDERABAD: Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao on Saturday stepped up his attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his party held a massive show of strength in support of Yashwant Sinha — the Opposition’s candidate for presidential election — the same day as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) commenced its two-day national executive meeting.

KCR, as the chief minister is popularly known as, received Sinha at the Begumpet airport but stayed away from receiving the Prime Minister a few hours later and instead send junior minister Talasani Srinivasa Yadav to welcome Modi.

The president of ruling Telangana Rashtra Samithi brought Sinha in a huge convoy of vehicles to Jala Vihar on the Necklace Road, where a meeting was organised to introduce the presidential candidate to party cadre.

The chief minister made an appeal to the electorate of all parties to exercise their “conscience vote” in the July 18 presidential poll. “In the past, veteran leader VV Giri was also elected as the President of India through a conscience vote exercise by the electorate cutting across their party affiliations,” he recalled.

KCR took a jibe at the PM, saying: “Modi has grown arrogant and dictatorial. He is pulling down the governments which oppose his rule and suppressing the voice that doesn’t agree with him. He is misusing the Constitutional bodies to crush his critics. He thinks he is a permanent Prime Minister but in democracy, nobody is permanent.”

He said that no section of the society was happy with the Modi rule and added that farmers were agitated, unemployed youths disturbed and inflation was increasing. “His call to make India a superpower with $5 trillion economy has become a joke with rising inflation,” he said. Speaking at the meeting later, Sinha termed the election a “battle of ideologies” and attacked the PM, who, he said, never believed in “consensus” but only “confrontation”.