India / I'm not Rahul Savarkar, I'll never apologise for truth: Rahul Gandhi

Former Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Saturday launched a blistering attack on the BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi saying he will never apologise for his rape comment that rocked Parliament on Friday.

“BJP asked me to apologise for telling the truth. I am not Rahul Savarkar. I am Rahul Gandhi. I will not apologise. Nor will anyone from the Congress,” he said at the Bharat Bachao rally at Ramlila Maidan.

In the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, Rahul Gandhi repeatedly mocked Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, by saying that the freedom fighter had apologised to the British to get out of jail.

His comment at an election rally in Jharkhand where he said “PM Modi used to say ‘Make in India’ but nowadays wherever you look, it is ‘Rape in India’. In Uttar Pradesh, Narendra Modi’s MLA raped a woman, then she met with an accident but Narendra Modi did not utter a word,” sparked a furore with Union minister Smriti Irani leading the BJP’s attack. She later led a delegation of BJP’s women parliamentarians to complain to the Election Commission and seek “severest possible action” against Gandhi for his comments made on Thursday.

At the Ramlila Maidan, Rahul Gandhi stuck to his guns He said that instead Modi is the one who should apologise for “destroying” India’s economy.

“Narendra Modi must apologise to the country for destroying the economy and so must his assistant Amit Shah…. Economy was India’ strength which was once at 9% GDP. And today it is around 4%. Modi alone destroyed the country’s economy. Demonetisation hurt the economy so badly that it never recovered. He lied about cracking down on black economy.”

He said Modi’s insistence on implementing the GST further weakened the economy.

“Manmohan Singh and Chidamabaram warned him against implementing GST without a pilot project. But he was adamant about it,” Gandhi said.

The former Congress chief said Modi succeeded in doing to what India’s enemies had been trying to do – “ to destroy its economy” and accused the PM of practicing crony capitalism by giving preferential treatment to a few capitalists.