Mahila Jagriti Samaroh in Assam

‘It’s the Italian blood that
mattered’: Sushmaji
From Our Correspondent

On January 22, senior BJP leader Smt. Sushma Swaraj addressed a massive women’s rally ‘Mahila Jagriti Samaroh’ organised in Guwahati by Assam BJP. During her address she touched upon numerous issues concerning women. She also talked about the implications of Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origin and said BJP’s opposition to the Congress president becoming the Prime Minister was vindicated by the recent defreezing of accounts of Italian business Ottavio Quattrocchi.

“Quattrocchi is neither related to Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh nor to the CBI, so now it is proved that it is the Italian blood which mattered,” she said.

“When everything is normal it is fine but when there is a clash of interests between two countries it is the blood which matters,” Smt. Swaraj thundered while directly accusing the Congress president of ordering the defreezing of Quattrocchi’s London accounts.

“When I first raised the matter that a person of foreign origin could not become the country’s Prime Minister many people including the media opposed but my apprehension has come true now and it is for the people to see,” she said during her half-hour address.

She pointed out that Quattrocchi’s was only one of the many cases which had shown that the Congress was a corrupt party as was proved in the Iraqi oil scam and the KGB funding issue exposed by Mitrokhin’s Archive-II. Hitting the Congress hard, Smt. Swaraj alleged that Congress, instead of honouring the Supreme Court verdict to scrap the illegal IMDT Act, was in fact, opposing it.

Smt. Swaraj said that “the government has formed a Group of Ministers in an apparent attempt to nullify the Apex Court’s verdict which is unfortunate”. She also came down heavily on the Tarun Gogoi-led Congress government in the State for allegedly failing to maintain law and order, resulting in killing of innocent people including a journalist Prahlad Goala in Golaghat district.

She urged the women to bring about a revolution in the State and overthrow the ‘corrupt’ Congress government.

Rajasthan Chief Minister Smt. Vasundhara Raje Scindia also addressed the rally and said that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had totally failed to be a true representative of the people of Assam. “The Prime Minister simply announces a package which are just false promises for the people of the State who have elected him to Parliament (Rajya Sabha)”, she added.

Popular television artiste and BJP leader Smt. Smriti Irani alleged that the State government was safeguarding the interest of infiltrators at the cost of the common people. Crime against women was growing and even children were not spared from molestation, she alleged.

Former Union Minister Bijoya Chakravarty and State BJP President Indramoni Bora also spoke at the rally.