Shimla | BJP chief Amit Shah on Monday said for the Congress OROP means ‘only Rahul, only Priyanka’, using the acronym for ‘one rank, one pension’ scheme for military personnel to take a jibe at the Congress.
Shah hurled the jibe at the Congress days after party president Rahul Gandhi’s sister Priyanka Gandhi was inducted as the opposition party’s general secretary for eastern Uttar Pradesh.
The BJP president was addressing a “BJP Panna Pramuk Sammelan” at Hamirpur, also known as “Martyrs’ Land” in Himachal Pradesh owing to a significant number of people from the district and adjoining areas joining the Army.
Thanking Himachal Pradesh voters for ensuring the victory of BJP candidates in all the four Lok Sabha seats in the hill state during the 2014 general elections, Shah said, “The Modi government implemented OROP for ex-servicemen in a true sense.”
No one cared for soldiers for over 70 years but when the Modi government came to power, it implemented the OROP, he added.
However, the Congress also follows OROP, which is “Only Rahul Only Priyanka”, Shah sarcastically said. He was referring to the One Rank, One Pension scheme to equalise pension payments for retired military personnel in the country to take a dig at the opposition party over the induction of Priyanka Gandhi as a key office bearer.
But the jibe at the Congress was returned by National Conference leader Omar Abdullah who coined a new acronym to target the BJP, saying the country was suffering from too much “ODOMOS- overdose of only Modi only Shah”.
“While the rest of the country suffers from too much ODOMOS – overdose (of) only Modi only Shah,” the former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir tweeted.
In his address to BJP workers ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, Shah said, “Desh ek Majboot Sarkar chahta hai, majboor sarkar nahi. (The country wants a strong government not a weak and hapless one).”
The country wants a government which can give Pakistan a befitting reply for killing its soldiers, he said.
“In his speeches, the Congress president nowadays brings up the issue of poverty. I just want to ask Rahul baba what the Congress governments did for decades to eradicate poverty. It’s only the BJP government which is taking measures to eradicate it,” he added.
They couldn’t provide even a gas cylinder to each household in the country, he claimed.
Himachal got only Rs. 44,325 crore from the 13th Finance Commission during the Congress government, while the Modi government gave Rs. 1,15,865 crore to this hill state, Shah said.
The BJP president said like former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Modi too remains connected with the state.
Without naming former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh and his family members, Shah said, “No one else except raja, rani and rajkumar was given importance during the five-year term of the previous Congress government in the state.”
On the contrary, the Himachal residents now feel that the Jai Ram Thakur-led BJP government is their own government, he said, adding a total of 20,062 complaints out of 25,227 have been redressed in Jan Manch programmes launched by the Thakur government.
BJP workers are the basis of our victory and every BJP Panna Pramukh is determined to make Modi the PM again, said Shah, coining a slogan “mera booth, sabse majboot” for the party workers.
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