BJP patriarch Murli Manohar Joshi cast his vote today in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s constituency, Varanasi, which went into polls in the last and seventh phase of the Lok Sabha elections.
The veteran leader while taking questions after coming out of the polling booth said that Modi has the voter’s blessings. Though he asserted that he was there to cast his vote and does not wish to talk about politics, when the journalists insisted, he said that the public will decide if there was development in the last five years or not and said that the Prime Minister has the support of his voters.
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The BJP leader, at no point of time, appeared displeased with Modi or his government as the Congress ecosystem had earlier claimed, attempting to use the veteran leader to target PM Modi.
On the contrary, when a journalist questioned him about a new generation of BJP leaders ‘taking over’, Joshi jovially pointed it out that a new generation of journalists is taking over too.
In April 2019, just as the Lok Sabha election had commenced, a fake letter claiming to be written by senior BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi to BJP patriarch LK Advani criticising the state of the BJP under Prime Minister Narendra Modi had been circulated vigorously across the social media.
In that ‘fake’ letter, Murli Manohar Joshi’s name has been used to paint an unfavourable image against the BJP, especially against the Prime Minister. It says that Joshi had received offers from SP-BSP coalition to contest the elections. Since veteran leaders of BJP like Joshi and Advani were excluded from the party’s candidate list for the Lok Sabha elections, opposition parties and a section of media have been trying to claim a rift in the party by asserting that Modi-Shah duo has been sidelining other leaders of the party.
This ‘fake’ letter was extensively used by the Congress party trolls in an attempt to create a false narrative ahead of the second phase of 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Moreover, in 2017, the Congress had also dragged BJP’s veteran leaders like LK Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, Sanjay Joshi, Keshubhai Patel and Anandiben Patel, in its attempt to malign Modi and Shah’s image, by alleging they were “victims” of Modi and BJP chief Amit Shah’s politics of dominance in BJP.
Congress’ spokesperson, Randeep Surjewala raked up the names of former BJP top guns alleging that Modi-Shah duo had sidelined the veteran leaders to rise to power.
Interestingly, Congress President Rahul Gandhi, who himself climbed the hierarchical ladder leaving behind many veteran Congress leaders, merely because of his family name, had castigated Modi for sidelining senior leader LK Advani, to make way for Amit Shah.
Gandhi had used Advani’s name to mount attacks on PM Modi and while attacking him he crossed the line of decency by using crass language for a senior leader like LK Advani. He had stated that LK Advani was hit with shoes and was cast away by PM Modi.