Mumbai : Chief Minister Prithviraj Chavan on Saturday asserted that his government has taken various decisions that will help his party to come back to power and no one can accuse him of indecision.
“I’m being criticised for very slow pace of work. But, if we just consider one criteria of clearing files, I can say with confidence that none of the past Chief Ministers of the state must have cleared as many files as I did,” Chavan said at a function organised by a news channel here.
In an environment of rising political temperature, Chavan launched a vitriolic attack on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), saying it was better in selling statistics. In the same vein, he took a severe dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi, saying he won the Lok Sabha polls by “misleading voters”.
Chavan said “this election is for Maharashtra, not for Modi”. “People will decide who has the better experience of running the government,” he said, taking a swipe at ‘Mahayuti’ (the grand alliance).
Chavan said Maharashtra and Gujarat can’t be compared in terms of “political statements”. “Narendra Modi is better than others in the marketing of statistics. He was successful in misleading people. But, Modi won not only by impression of the Gujarat model,” he added.
Chavan said the Congress never cared for ‘pushing figures’. “While Punjab and Haryana boasts 90 per cent irrigated land, Maharashtra has 18 per cent. But we have faced natural disasters with all our might,” he said, adding, “Everyone talks of Gujarat model. See how many Gujaratis work here. No one goes hungry in my state. We have been in power for the last 15 years. It is apparant, people have found us better than the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance.”
“If you talk of Lok Sabha polls, the whole nation was angry with the UPA government. The anger is gone now,” Chavan said, recounting among his achievements the local body poll wins before the Lok Sabha elections, “improvement in infrastructure” and removal of encroachments.
“We gave mono rail, metro rail and expressways. If (then PM) Manmohan Singh said he wanted to make Mumbai a Shanghai, it was a way of putting things in perspective,” the Congress leader said.
On the question of Congress-NCP alliance, Chavan said, “We have fought five elections (three Lok Sabha polls and two assembly elections) together and we will also fight the sixth together. Seat adjustments keep cropping up.”
When asked whether the decision of the Democratic Front (DF) government to provide reservations to Maratha and Muslims communities in government jobs and educational institutions was motivated by vote bank politics, Chavan replied in negative.
“We have to submit a list of 40 star campaigners to the Election Commission and they are in the list,” he said.
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‘Uddhav has no experience in governance’
To a question on who will be the next chief minister, Chavan evaded a direct reply, saying, “He will be the one who has social acceptability.”
To a query on Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray’s chief ministerial ambitions, Chavan said that the Sena president has no experience in governance. “Uddhav was not part of the previous Sena-BJP government (in 1995),” he said.
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