Ahmedabad, Feb 17 (IANS) A day after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh accused the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of adopting a ‘hostile attitude’ towards his government because of action against a Gujarat minister, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi hit back terming his remark as the ‘biggest joke of 2011’.
‘The PM’s speech yesterday, I think, is the biggest joke of 2011,’ Modi said here.
‘You (PM) are not being able to do anything and you have admitted of your difficulties in public. For this, it is not needed to blame any minister from Gujarat or the government of Gujarat. They try to drag Gujarat’s name all the time. I think his remark was very humorous,’ he added.
In a media interaction Wednesday, the prime minister accused the opposition party of adopting a ‘hostile attitude’ towards the government and blamed it for delaying the introduction of a single goods and service tax (GST) in the country.
Singh said the GST will make India’s tax system an ‘envy of the world’.
But, he told the select editors of electronic media invited for tghe interaction, the opposition-led states are not cooperating.
‘The reasons that have been given, frankly, I cannot mention it in public. They say because you have taken some decision against a particular person, who was a minister in Gujarat, we must reverse it.’
The prime minister was apparently referring to the arrest of Gujarat’s former minister of state for home Amit Shah, who was held last year by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in connection with the 2005 killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh in a staged shootout.
