“Our family nurtured democracy of this country with their blood”: Priyanka Gandhi lashes out at BJP

New Delhi: Congress leader Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on Sunday trained her guns on the ruling BJP and vowed to keep fighting for the people at the party's Sankalap Satyagraha to protest against the move to disqualify her brother and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. "Who thinks that they can silence us by scaring and humiliating us? Listen, we will not stop, I will see to it that the hard-earned money of the public is not being looted and given to few people," Priyanka Gandhi said in a hard-hitting attack on the ruling party at the Centre. "It was my family (Nehru-Gandhi) who nurtured the democracy of this country with their blood," she said. Rahul Gandhi, on Friday, was disqualified as a member of the Lok Sabha, a day after a Surat court sentenced him to two years imprisonment in a defamation case filed against him over his 'Modi surname' remark. The decision came pertaining to his remark made in April 2019, where he had said "how come all the thieves have Modi as the common surname" at a Lok Sabha election rally at Kolar in Karnataka. The court approved Gandhi's bail on a surety and stayed the sentence for 30 days to allow him to approach the higher courts. "My brother went to PM Modi and hugged him in the Parliament and said he has no hatred for you. We might have different ideologies but we do not have the ideology of hatred," the Congress General Secretary said at Raj Ghat. "You (BJP) talk about 'Pariwarvaad', I want to ask who was Lord Ram. Was he 'Pariwarvaadi', or were the Pandavas 'Pariwarvaadi' just because they fought for the culture of their family? Should we be ashamed because our family members fought for the people of the country?" she said. Referring to Rahul Gandhi's disqualification, the Congress leader said that such people are not disqualified from the Parliament. "They are not sent to jail, and they are not stopped from contesting elections for years. They have insulted my family a lot of times, but we kept quiet," she said. "My father's dead body was under this tricolour, and my brother was following him, you insult that martyr in the Parliament. You call the martyr's son Mir Jafar, you point fingers at the Nehru family. You insult the Kashmiri tradition where a son uses his father's surname," Gandhi said. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national spokesperson Sambit Patra on Tuesday hit out at Congress MP Rahul Gandhi and compared him to the present-day Mir Jafar of Indian polity and said that he has to apologise for his remarks in the UK. In February, Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a dig at the Nehru-Gandhi family over a large number of schemes named after its members and asked why they are "scared of keeping the Nehru surname". "Some had problems with the names of schemes of govt and Sanskrit words in the names. I read in a report that 600 government schemes were in the Gandhi-Nehru family's name...I don't understand why people from their generation don't keep Nehru as their surname, what's the fear and shame?" PM Modi had said while replying to the debate in Rajya Sabha on the motion of thanks to the President's address in February. (ANI)