By IANS,
Mumbai: Attacking the prime minister yet again, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader L.K. Advani Friday said that Manmohan Singh does not have the last word on national decisions.
“Our prime minister does not have the last word. It lies with the others at 10 Janpath (residence of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi),” Advani said here.
Claiming this is the very reason for the continuing corruption, Advani said that he respected Manmohan Singh more when he was the finance minister.
“When he served as a finance minister in the late P.V. Narasimha Rao government, he really worked towards bring about change in the economic policies,” he said.
Taking on the United Progressive Alliance government for the rising food inflation, Advani said that it has disturbed the budget of housewives.
“Like corruption, there is no end to inflation also. Budget of middle class households has been disturbed badly,” he said.
Earlier while his convoy entered Mumbai, over 250 members of the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the students’ wing of the Congress, carried out protests demanding action against the corrupt ministers of BJP.
As Advani’s Jan Chetan Yatra entered Mumbai’s central suburb of Bhandup, NSUI members showed him black flags and shouted slogans against him.
“What is the purpose of BJP’s yatra? Fighting corruption? The irony is, that BJP is also a corrupt party and hence we are protesting against this hypocrisy,” NSUI Mumbai president Suraj Thakur told IANS.
The video version of the yatra’s theme song was also released here amongst leaders of BJP and its allies like Pratibha Advani, Uddhav Thackeray and Gopinath Munde.
Earlier Friday, Advani, in Pune, condemned the hike in petrol prices saying that it is a result of government’s “mismanagement”.
He said that the international crude prices were not going up the way fuel prices in the country were spiralling.