Congress to emerge largest party in polls: Sinha

ISLAMABAD: Sitting Indian Parliament member (MP) from Indian city Patna Sahib and Congress candidate Shatrughan Sinha has claimed that the Congress would emerge as the single largest party after the election, as Narendra Modi’s lahar (wave) has turned into a Modi Kahar (curse) in India.

Talking to the media after winding up his campaign for Patna Sahib, where he is pitted against the BJP’s Ravi Shankar Prasad, Sinha said the BJP would be washed out in Uttar Pradesh and in other Hindi heartlands due to the misery rained on the people owing to faulty implementation of the GST, demonetisation and vindictive politics resorted to by the BJP-led Central government against its political rivals.

Dismayed by the BJP’s allegations that he had gone on the offensive against the BJP leadership after being denied a ministerial berth at the Centre, Sinha said the internal democracy in the BJP had turned into autocracy, where only sycophants could survive and thrive. Sinha, also popularly known as Bihari Babu, quipped this was tantamount to “chori oopar se seenazori (commit a wrongdoing and then brazen it out)”.

“It has become a one-man show and two-man army,” Sinha said, adding that party’s stalwarts like LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Yashwant Sinha, et al, by whom the present leaderships felt threatened were forced to retire.

Former Union minister and Congress leader Subodh Kant Sahay said that the BJP would suffer a major blow in Uttar Pradesh, as it would lose a majority if its seats, like in Jharkhand and Bihar. “The Grand Alliance (GA) under Indian Congress will get about 400 seats and the NDA would be restricted to barely 100 seats in the country.

The Modi government has disappointed all sections of the society including farmers, students and the poor,” he said. Sahay claimed that RJD chief Lalu Prasad was jailed for his tirade against the BJP and said that the social equations as well as political equations of Bihar and Jharkhand would change soon.