Congress MP Ripun Bora has said that as many as there are 45 BJP lawmakers in both Houses of parliament whose kin are in politics.
The Rajya Sabha MP from Assam on Wednesday presented a list of BJP lawmakers in both Houses whose kin are in politics.
He asserted that the saffron party has no moral right to slander the Congress, and particularly the Gandhi-Nehru family, over “dynastic politics”.
Bora claimed that the grand old party does not have that many MPs whose family members are in politics.
“Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s son Pankaj Singh is an MLA in Uttar Pradesh, while Union ministers Anurag Thakur, Piyush Goyal and Dharmendra Pradhan’s fathers were either former chief ministers or central ministers. There are 18 other such examples in the current Lok Sabha,” he told reporters in Guwahati.
“The Congress never pilloried the BJP over the issue as we firmly believe that if two or more members of a family occupy important positions in the government or the party, they are doing so through a democratic process or based on their capabilities and acceptability among the people,” Bora said.
In 2004, when the Congress secured a majority in the Lok Sabha, Sonia Gandhi was urged to assume the prime minister’s post but she declined and handed over the baton to Dr. Manmohan Singh, during whose tenure Rahul Gandhi could have become a central minister but that didn’t happen, he added.