By IANS,
Bangalore : Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate L. K. Advani late Saturday challenged the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government to dissolve Parliament and hold Lok Sabha elections immediately.
“I throw challenge to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi to hold general elections now so that people can give their verdict,” Advani said at the party’s first ‘Vijay Sankalp (victory affirmation) rally here.
“Dissolve Lok Sabha. Announce elections. Why wait till May next year,” the opposition leader in Lok Sabha said.
Asserting that the people of India wanted to get rid the “corrupt” and “incompetent” government, Advani told the crowd that now was the time to let people decide who should govern the country, which he said had been brought to the brink by the government’s failure on all fronts.
“Let the electorate decide which party or alliance is better to rule the country. Let us test to find out who has the people’s mandate to form the next government. Let the people have a chance to compare the performance of our NDA government with that of the UPA government,” Advani said raising his voice during his 35-minute address in English and Hindi.
“In my six decades of political life, I have not come across a prime minister who could not take credit for any achievement as in the case of Manmohan Singh. The perception in the establishment is success belongs to Sonia Gandhi and failures to Manmohan Singh,” he added.
Holding the UPA government responsible for inflation, price rise, agrarian crisis, terrorism and a flawed Indo-US nuclear deal, the BJP leader called the cash-for-votes incident “a mega scam”.
“I am sorry to say that by this single act of misdemeanour, which can be dubbed mega scam, Manmohan Singh has forfeited any moral right to be a man of integrity and purity in public life,” Advani said.
Advani also lauded the people of Karnataka for having voted his party to power for the first time in the state and south India.