BHOPAL: Chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan attacked Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday by saying that he defamed India by criticising Prime Minister Narendra Modi , BJP and its frontal organisation RSS on foreign soil.

“What tradition is Rahul Gandhi adopting is hard to understand. Once I was in Washington when Manmohan Singh was our Prime Minister. Journalists asked me whether your PM was an under-achiever. I immediately objected to their remarks and said that India’s PM could never be an under-achiever. He was not the PM of any party but of the entire nation. Our PM is our pride’, recalled Chouhan during a press conference in Sagar.

Chouhan’s statement was a response to Rahul Gandhi’s speech in London, where he had likened the RSS to the radical Islamist outfit Muslim brotherhood, saying that RSS was trying to change the nature of India to capture its institutions.

A day before, chief minister Chouhan toured three main assembly constituencies of Sagar district and kicked off his Jan Ashirwad Yatra for Tikamgarh district. Chouhan also leashed a scathing attack on the Congress. He said Congress and BJP fight over ideological differences and one should not defame the entire nation.

Chouhan also rejected Congress’s allegations that shoes distributed to tribals by the BJP-led government were spreading cancer. He said Congress was trying to misguide the public by spreading false information.

“Congress is indulging in politics of allegations. The party has given up political decency to grab power in the state. It was due to the failures of the Congress that Bundelkhand remained a backward region. BJP is trying to change it”, said Chouhan.

Replying to a question on the judicial custody of a senior citizen by the district collector of Narsinghpur, Chouhan said that the government will investigate the matter and justice will be done if anything comes out against the administration.

The CM also reiterated the welfare programmes, irrigation projects and development works undertaken by the BJP-ruled state government in the Bundelkhand region.

