New Delhi: The Opposition on Thursday asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to explain his remarks that “many forces” were out to undermine India’s interests and the Left also equated the comments with that of Indira Gandhi raising the bogey of foreign hand to justify Emergency.
“Let the PM explain. Whenever the government is under siege, it tries the foreign hand. It is an old tactic of the government,” senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad said.
CPI leader D Raja said, “If the Prime Minister has something in his mind that some forces are undermining India, he must identify these forces and clarify. Then only he can motivate the country. He must identify which are these forces,”
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, while making a statement on Anna Hazare issue in Parliament, on Wednesday said, “There are many forces that would not like to see India realise its true place in the comity of nations. We must not play into their hands.”
Raja asked, “Who are the persons who are trying to undermine India? You tell us clearly. The statement is vague. Now the PM has to clarify what he means by that?”
CPI(M) leader Sitaram Yechury said Singh’s remarks were “disturbingly familiar” to the late prime minister Indira Gandhi’s arguments to justify imposition of Emergency in 1975.
Terming the statement as “curious”, Yechury said, “This sounds disturbingly familiar to the arguments advanced by late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who invoked the bogey of foreign hand to justify the imposition of internal Emergency in 1975.”
“The Indian people had heroically defeated such an attack on democracy then and they are today more than ever determined to foil any such effort”, he said in an editorial in the forthcoming issue of CPI(M) organ ‘People’s Democracy’.
“Strangely, such a caution comes from this UPA government “, Yechury said. (PTI)