Rajiv Gandhi Was India’s Biggest Mob Lyncher: SAD Leader Backs PM’s ‘Bhrashtachari no.1’ Remark

"PM Narendra Modi is right in saying that Rajiv Gandhi was corrupt number one, but he was also India's biggest mob lyncher," Shiromani Akali Dal leader Manjinder Singh Sirsa said.

New Delhi: Shiromani Akali Dal national spokesman Manjinder Singh Sirsa on Sunday said that former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was “India’s biggest mob lyncher”. Endorsing Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “bhrashtachari (corrupt) no.1” remark against the late prime minister, Sirsa said Gandhi was the only prime minister in the world who “organised mob lynching against a particular community”.

“Prime Minister Narendra Modi is right in saying that Rajiv Gandhi was corrupt number one, but he was also India’s biggest mob lyncher,” he alleged in a statement.

Sirsa alleged that Rajiv Gandhi not only encouraged genocide against Sikhs but also “protected and rewarded” those who were involved in it. He asked Congress chief Rahul Gandhi to clarify why he has not accepted that his party was guilty and why has he failed to express sympathy with the families of victims of the 1984 riots.

Earlier on Saturday, while addressing a rally in Uttar Pradesh’s Pratapgarh, PM Modi had launched a scathing attack on Congress president Rahul Gandhi saying that the life of his father, late former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, ended as ‘Bhrastachari number 1’. “Your father was termed ‘Mr Clean’ by his courtiers, but his life ended as ‘Bhrashtachari No 1’ (corrupt number 1),” Modi said, in an apparent reference to the Bofors case in 1980s, in which the late former PM was accused of receiving kickbacks from Swedish defence manufacturer Bofors for the sale of its artillery gun to India.

On Sunday, Congress president Rahul Gandhi and party general secretary for UP (east) Priyanka Gandhi hit back at Narendra Modi over his ‘Bhrashtachari No 1’ jibe at their father and later former PM Rajiv Gandhi. While Rahul asserted that PM Modi is projecting his inner beliefs about himself onto his father, Priyanka said that the remark was an insult to Rajiv Gandhi’s martyrdom.

(With agency inputs)