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Updated: Apr 29, 2020 17:04 IST

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday invoked Gujarati pride at an election rally in state’s Junagarh to target the Congress saying that the rival party has always harboured “hatred towards Gujarat”. PM Modi said the “Nehru-Gandhi family of the Congress” first targeted Sardar Patel and Morarji Desai before “using all kinds of abuses” at him.

“The Nehru-Gandhi family is rattled seeing that this chaiwala has completed five years with full strength,” said PM Modi charging the Congress of relegating Sardar Patel to oblivion and engineering the downfall of the Morarji Desai government in 1970s. They faced wrath of the Congress because they belonged to Gujarat, PM Modi said.

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Sardar Patel was a freedom fighter and the first deputy prime minister. Along with Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel was among the top leaders of the Congress at the time of Independence and in the first government formed under the Congress’s leadership.

Desai, rose to prominence as a Congress leader but quit the party in 1970s and led the Janata Party government in post-Emergency period.

The prime minister said that the Congress is unnerved at the success of the Modi government over the past five years. He said, “One needs to see our track record and their (Congress and its allies) tape record. Our track record is of fight against terror, focus on development, and taking up the cause of the poor. But the Congress’s tape record plays only one song, Modi Hatao (Remove Modi).”

“They don’t have any other agenda except Remove Modi,” said the prime minister adding the Congress is supporting those who want to separate Jammu and Kashmir from India and have a separate prime minister there.

The prime minister, delivering most of his speech in Gujarati, made a strong pitch for a repeat of 2014 performance of the BJP, which had won all 26 Lok Sabha seats in the state. Gujarat will go to the polls for all parliamentary seats in the third phase of the Lok Sabha elections on April 23.