Narendra Modi sidelined BJP veterans to promote himself: Chiranjeevi

Visakhapatnam: Andhra Pradesh Congress campaign committee chief Chiranjeevi accused BJP's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi of pushing aside veteran leaders of his party to promote himself.

Addressing a press conference on Wednesday during his election campaign on behalf of Congress candidates in the city, Chiranjeevi compared the Gujarat Chief Minister to Hitler.

"Modi is a Hitler. He hijacked the party to promote himself. He pushed aside all BJP veterans for his selfishness. If he becomes Prime Minister, corporates will rule the country and there will be no place for the common man. How could Chandrababu Naidu ally with such a leader," Chiranjeevi said.

He lambasted both YSR Congress chief Jagamohan Reddy and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) supremo N Chandrababu Naidu, accusing them of selling Assembly and Parliament tickets as well as trying to come to power by using money. He said both of them are desperate to grab power.

It is the same Naidu, who had accused the BJP and walked out of the NDA in 2004, stating that it was a historic mistake to ally with it, who had (now) allied with the BJP once again, he said. "It shows how desperate he is to come to power. I feel that even Jagamohan Reddy may not hesitate to support Modi after polls," he said.

Ridiculing the Modi model of development, he said that Gujarat stood at the eighth place in the country in overall development. Chiranjeevi also found fault with Naidu's new method of picking candidates through interactive voice response system (IVRS), which was termed as "innovative" by the TDP chief.

He said Naidu never selected candidates based on responses through IVRS, but by collecting money from wealthy candidates. He said the surveys which predicted doom for Congress were created by certain parties only to mislead the public and reiterated that the Congress manifesto is implementable.

He also said both Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi would visit various places including Visakhapatnam in Andhra Pradesh very soon, as part of the party's poll campaign.