Prime Minister Narendra Modi turned a military asset into a political asset, said Congress president Rahul Gandhi in Udaipur Saturday while referring to the BJP government revealing details of Army’s 2016 surgical strikes into Pakistan.
Addressing a public interaction with members of the business community and professionals in Udaipur, Rahul Gandhi compared functioning styles of former PM Manmohan Singh and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
He said that the BJP government wasn’t the only one that had permitted surgical strikes and that surgical strikes were also carried out during former prime minister Manmohan Singh’s tenure.
“Do you know that like Narendra Modi, Manmohan Singh ji had also permitted surgical strikes thrice when Army came to him and said that we need to retaliate against Pakistan for what they’ve done. The Army also said that they wanted it to be secret, for their own purposes,” Rahul Gandhi said.
He said that immediately after the surgical strikes, PM Modi was campaigning for the Uttar Pradesh elections and his party was bound to lose. In order to turn things around in the election, details of the surgical strike were made public.
“But Narendra Modi actually reached into Army’s domain and shaped their surgical strike, he turned their surgical strike into a political asset when it actually was a military decision,” Rahul Gandhi said.
“What the Army would have liked better was that if they carried out surgical strikes, it would be beneficial if nobody knew about it. But Modi didn’t want that. He was fighting an election in UP and he was losing it. So he revealed the details to turn a military asset into a political asset,” Rahul Gandhi said.
“PM is convinced that he knows better than Army what needs to be done in Army’s area, better than foreign minister what needs to be done in the foreign ministry, and better than agriculture minister what needs to be done in agriculture because he has a sense that all knowledge comes from his brain,” Rahul Gandhi said.