By IANS,
Kolkata: The Bharatiya Janata Party Thursday accused the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government of failing to tick off the US after senior officials of that country “dared to comment” on corruption-related issues in India.
“While on the one hand, this UPA government beats up sleeping people in midnight swoops to demolish agitations and bans civil society programmes against corruption, it remains silent when a foreign country comments on our internal matters. This is a serious issue,” BJP vice president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi told media persons here.
“I am not in agreement with what America has said. I feel the US is interfering in our internal issue.”
“I had expected the prime minister and the central government to take it up with the senior US administration officials. But till this moment, this government has not spoken to US on this,” he said.
“We are proud of India. We are the world’s largest democracy. Here we agitate democratically. The problem is this government is always bowing its head to the USA”.
Asked to comment about yoga guru Baba Ramdev’s forcible removal from an anti-graft mass agitation, US State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters in Washington Monday that they had seen the various media reports about the incident but consider it an internal Indian issue.
“Speaking more broadly, though, we do support the right to peaceful assembly, but we also support a democratic government’s right to require permits and enforce public security,” he said. “But again, we believe it’s an internal matter for the Indian government.”
Asked why the US had not asked Indian authorities to protect peaceful protesters, Toner said: “It’s a fair question, absolutely, because we have said elsewhere that we support the universal aspirations of people to demonstrate and to express their views in a peaceful manner.”
In response to persistent questioning about alleged police brutality, he said it was a complex issue.
“We obviously support their right to peaceful assembly. We respect India’s stature as the world’s largest democracy, and we believe it’s, right now, an internal matter for them to decide the best way forward,” he said.
Meanwhile, Naqvi called UPA an “Undemocratic Peoples’ Alliance”.
“From madam to didi, from maharani to yuvraj, every one is equally responsible for the corruption and scam-friendly acts of the present government,” he said, in indirect references to Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and party general secretary Rahul Gandhi, among others.
Naqvi accused the government of “dishonouring” the dignity of parliament by starting a new trend of “organising compromise meetings and discussions in five-star hotels and in other places rather than in parliament, referring to the meeting of two central ministers with Ramdev in an upscale Delhi hotel.
Asked about Ramdev’s call to arm his supporters, Naqvi said: “We don’t consider Baba Ramdevji as Lok Nayak Jai Prakash Narayan. Similarly, we don’t consider Anna Hazare as Mahatma Gandhi. We only support the issues which they have raised.”
He ruled out the participation of Hazare or Ramdev in the BJP’s agitations against graft. “BJP leaders and workers will take part in these programmes. Neither have we requested them (Hazare and Ramdev) nor have they requested that they be allowed to participate”.