Home India If a lawyer is finance minister, a TV actress is HRD minister... why can't I speak on GST: Shatrughan Sinha

If a lawyer is finance minister, a TV actress is HRD minister… why can’t I speak on GST: Shatrughan Sinha

"The atmosphere nowadays is such that either you support a person or be ready to be called anti-national," said Shatrughan Sinha.

The BJP MP had in November also got into trouble for using the 'chaiwala' jibe against Prime Minister Modi

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Shatrughan Sinha, who is known for not mincing his words, has mocked at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s popular anti-graft slogan- ‘na khaoonga, na khane doonga’, which roughly translates to ‘will not take (bribe) or not let others take.

“I did not join politics saying ‘na jeeoonga na jeene doonga’ (neither will I live, nor allow others to live),” said Sinha Thursday in an apparent reference to PM Modi while speaking at a book launch in the national capital.

He also said the atmosphere in the country is such that people have to either support “a person” or risk being called “anti-national”. “The atmosphere nowadays is such that either you support a person or be ready to be called anti-national.”

The outspoken Lok Sabha member from Patna Sahib also made fun of ministers in the Union Cabinet, calling them a “bunch of sycophants” 90 per cent of whom were hardly known to people. “It (the government) is a bunch of sycophants. Ninety per cent of ministers are those who you (people) don’t know. They are here not to do something creative or constructive….they are just busy saving their jobs.”

“If a lawyer can become finance minister, a TV actress can become HRD minister and a tea-seller…, then why cannot I speak on these issues,” he said, apparently targeting Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, Information and Broadcasting Minister Smriti Irani, who earlier held the HRD portfolio, and the prime minister. “Intellectuals are being killed and now even judges are being killed,” he alleged, claiming that these issues were not getting adequate attention in the media as ‘dhantantra’ (money power) was getting the better of ‘jantantra’ (people’s power),” he added.

The 71-year-old also rubbished the claim by his detractors that he was upset over not being made a minister, saying he never had any such expectations.

His attack at the ruling dispensation came days after the Congress’s youth wing Yuva Desh tweeted a “chai wala” meme targeting PM Modi, which they later deleted.

With PTI inputs

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