By IANS,
New Delhi : Criticising the Congress for dropping him as candidate, senior party leader Jagdish Tytler Thursday said the decision was unfortunate and that the “shoe incident was just an excuse”.
“It was an unfortunate thing done to me by the party,” Tytler said after casting his vote at the Rakabganj polling station in New Delhi constituency.
He was replaced by J.P. Agarwal as the Congress candidate from New Delhi after a journalist tossed a shoe at Home Minister P. Chidambaram to protest the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) clean chit to Tytler in a 1984 anti-Sikh riots case, leading to protests against his candidature.
Tytler said: “The shoe incident was just an excuse. The only weird thing is why did the party take away the ticket after giving it, when all the work and preparation had (been) started by me? They should not have given me the ticket in the first place.”
He said, “But as such I have no one to blame. I am a disciplined man of the party, so I accepted the decision.”
“No, I don’t feel the decision was unfair to me because everything was very circumstantial. As people said it would affect the party’s prospects in Punjab and then the media overdid it to by making statements like I am a criminal bigger then Narendra Modi,” Tytler said.
But he said had he been allowed to contest, the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) would not have stood a chance. He was replaced by J.P. Agarwal in the North-East Delhi constituency.
Claiming his innocence, Tytler said there was not a single affidavit filed against him in court that could prove his involvement in the 1984 riots.
He said more than 10 commissions were set up during the tenure of Congress as well as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) governments, but none could prove that he had any connection with the riots case.