New Delhi : After Jayanthi Natarajan launched a direct attack on Rahul Gandhi for his interference in former’s Environment Ministry, the BJP lost no time in capitalising on the disclosures.
Rahul Gandhi has been accusing PM Narendra Modi of promoting ‘crony capitalism’ by showering the government’s favours on a handful of the industrialists and so Jaitley sought to stress that what Natarajan has exposed is the true ‘crony capitalism’.
He also announced that the government will have to undertake the review of all the projects that were granted or not granted approval by the environment ministry during the previous UPA regime. Environment and Forests Minister Prakash Javadekar slipped in that he was calling for examination all files tackled by Jayanthi Natarajan in view of the disclosures in the letter she had written to Congress President Sonia Gandhi on November 5 last year.
Within hours of her letter published in The Hindu on Friday, she held a press conference and announced her resignation from the primary membership of the Congress, vouching for the report that she had only honoured Rahul’s requests and that she had rejected the projects at the Congress bidding and that she did not know why Prime Minister Manmohan Singh asked her to put in papers on December 20, 2013.
Jaitley gave a spin to her disclosure saying, “when whims overtake legal requirements, this becomes a textbook case of crony capitalism, and this is exactly what UPA government was practicing.” He went on to charge the UPA as practitioner of sadistic economy and said, “This sadistic economy which the UPA tried to build up was vindictive in nature, wanting to teach some people a lesson and wanting to favour some people.”
He said there were rumours all these years on how this practice of punish and reward was going on in UPA but it is “now established to be true” and he can now say with authority that the growth rates in the country had “radically gone down” during UPA because of delay in approvals being granted to projects.
