Rajasthan election: PM Modi lies much more at election time, alleges Jairam Ramesh

He calls Prime Minister Narendra Modi the "jagadguru of jhooth", or world leader of lies.

He repeated the allegation again on Friday, 10 November, while interacting with the media in Udaipur, where the prime minister, Narendra Modi, had addressed an election rally the previous day.

The prime minister had launched a scathing attack on the Congress government in Rajasthan in particular, and the Congress and its leaders in general. He referred to the murder in Udaipur last year of a tailor, Kanhaiyalal, and accused the Congress government and the party of being hand-in-glove with "terrorists".

Asked to comment, the Congress general secretary held up a photograph and asked, “Who is this person in the photograph?” The person in the photograph was the killer identified in that case, seen in the company of BJP leaders. Reminding mediapersons that the Rajasthan Police had arrested the culprit in a matter of four hours, he quipped, “I would not have raised this matter if the prime minister had not raised it. But since he did, we were ready today with the photographic evidence.”

Rajasthan chief minister Ashok Gehlot too, while addressing an election rally, said mildly that the prime minister was possibly misinformed. Kanhaiyalal, he asserted, was killed by people close to the BJP itself and the police had cracked the case in record time.

Unsparing in his criticism of what he described as "chronic lying" by the prime minister, Ramesh continued: “The prime minister lies in Parliament and also outside the Parliament. At election time, his lies increase and the prime minister keeps repeating it in the hope that some of it would stick”.

In a lighter vein, he repeated what he had said earlier:

Narendra Modi, Ramesh said, had been lying since he was the chief minister of Gujarat and he keeps lying out of the sheer force of habit. “Pradhan Mantri sach nahin bol sakte hain (the prime minister is incapable of speaking truth)," he alleged, before adding that the language used by the prime minister during election campaigns worsens, and borders on the crass.

Alleging that the prime minister had uttered a string of lies about the Gehlot government in Rajasthan, Ramesh reminded the media that the Congress government in the state had cracked down on the ‘paper leak culprits’, got houses of several culprits demolished and come up with legislation that provided for stringent punishment for people involved in paper leaks.

Pointing out that in BJP-ruled Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh too there were a series of ‘paper leak’ scandals, he asked what the BJP governments in those states had done.

Describing Rajasthan as a "model state", he cited the Gehlot government offering LPG cylinders at Rs 500 to the people and health insurance covering up to Rs 25 lakh worth of medical treatment.

The state government had done what it could to contain inflation, Ramesh maintained, subsidising essential services and products, making arrangements for food at reasonable rates and generating jobs for the people. In turn, he held the disastrous policies of the central government responsible for both inflation and unemployment.

It was again the union government that had weakened the Land Acquisition Act and the Forest Rights Act and sundry other progressive laws introduced by the UPA government, Ramesh said. As chief minister of Gujarat, he maintained, Narendra Modi had opposed the Food Security Act, Aadhaar and MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). It was with his back to the wall during the Covid-19 pandemic that Modi was forced to adopt MGNREGA, and he renamed the Food Security Act as the 'Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana' to supply free foodgrain to people, said the Congress leader.