Narendra Modi on Sunday escalated his attack on Congress misrule (vikrit vyavastha), corruption, and vote-bank politics, and endorsed and commended Goa’s uplifting vision of seeking special status to protect the identity, environment, traditions, and culture of the State without any extra financial support from the Centre. Addressing a two lakh strong crowd at the Vijay Sankalp Rally at the Merces Ground in Goa, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s Prime Ministerial candidate honed his attack on the corrosive politics and policies of the Congress, indicating that the countdown for the 2014 general election has begun in earnest now that the Assembly elections in northern India are over.

In his sharpest ever criticism of the Congress’s politics of Muslim appeasement which is shaking the foundations of the nation and eroding the basic framework of the Constitution, Narendra Modi lambasted the Congress desire to rule the nation at any cost. Just two days ago, he reminded his audience, the Union Home Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde gave an interview on television stating he had written a letter to all States and would again write to them to warn them to desist from arresting Muslims for any crimes. Why, asked the Gujarat Chief Minister, should guilty persons of one faith be treated differently, and why should the criminal law of the land not be applied evenly to all accused? Is crime decided according to religion, he asked, and asserted that the approach should be to ensure that all arrested persons are treated fairly and get justice if they are innocent. No one should go to jail on the basis of communal identity, but the same law must be applied to all.

Expressing rage at the Home Minister’s conduct, Narendra Modi pointed out that under the Constitutional arrangement, law and order is a State Subject and Shinde had no right to assault the Constitutional framework. Mocking at the Prime Minister, he said that if one complains to him about the “nonsense going on”, Manmohan Singh will claim surprise and say, “What, OK I will see”. In contrast to such ruinous behaviour, Goa has a common civil code and the people here live happily.

Expressing sympathy of the unemployment and economic distress in Goa on account of the closure of its mines, the Gujarat strongman said that the ‘Delhi sarkar’ is sleeping and does not understand that mining is the engine of the economy of a small State like Goa. Promising that the State’s travails would end in a few months, he assured that mining would be resumed with transparency and the protection of the environment. Deriding the functioning of the Union Ministry for Environment & Forests, he said that it was being said that the movement of files would stop until a new tax called ‘Jayanthi tax’ was paid; can we not change such a system of governance, he asked the audience. The Gujarat Government, he recalled, had once written to the Centre for permission to auction the leases for its limestone quarries to the highest bidder, in order to earn more money for its exchequer. To his surprise, the permission was refused on grounds that it was against the rules!

Recalling that the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had created a huge hype about taking the country into the 21st century, he asked if Gandhi had done even one thing to prepare the nation for the challenges of the current century. There is no need to recount the history of what happened in the Rajiv era, he said, lamenting that people had had very high hopes from a man coming from outside the formal political process, but all hopes were belied. Instead, the youth were faced with a situation in which they may have to repeat the struggles and hardships of their parents’ lives because the Congress, particularly in these last 10 years of the UPA regime, had put the people in a hopeless situation. Calling on the people to vote it out of office, he said that in the UPA had made all institutions and Constitutional offices dysfunctional and concentrated all power in one source which had no accountability. The BJP, in contrast, believed in decentralisation of power and would restore the accountability of all public offices.

Commending all the BJP leaders and Chief Ministers for living simple lives with their families, he said the nation now yearned to get rid of the Congress and its leaders, and particularly the Congress culture of the last 60 years which had seeped into the veins of the nation and many political parties, and emerged in public life as the diseases of nepotism, casteism, communalism, unemployment, poverty, and above all corruption. When people question the credentials of the BJP in this respect, they have only to look at persons like Atal Bihari Vajpayee who has been a parliamentarian for many years and held the office of the Prime Minister, but does not even own a house. In a family, Narendra Modi said, a non-performing member is seen as a burden. Ten years of Congress-UPA have become a burden on the nation with its unending saga of failures on all fronts. The parties that support the UPA and its legion of defenders are all guilty for the sufferings imposed on the nation. The country now needs experienced leaders to pull it out of the morass, people who have vision, even if they are never seen on television. He commended the Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar for dedicating the funds collected from the rally to the victims of a recent building collapse in which 25 persons have died.

BJP president Rajnath Singh said that though Goa is generally viewed as a favoured tourist destination, it was a history going back to the Mahabharata era and a culture that deserves proper recognition. The Puranas mention it as deo-bhumi; it is the famed tapa-bhumi of Shiva. And it was in Goa that the BJP decided Narendra Modi would be its Prime Ministerial candidate. Lamenting the Goa had to wait until 1961 for liberation from the Portuguese, he said the Congress was responsible for the continuing problems with Jammu & Kashmir and Article 370. Directly attacking Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi for the price rise, corruption, security crisis and other ills bedeviling the nation, he said that in his recent Press conference, Manmohan Singh had admitted that Sonia Gandhi was a power centre in the country. Condemning Manmohan Singh for his frontal attack on Narendra Modi at his Press conference, the urged the people to give the BJP a complete mandate to run a stable Government. Other speakers at the rally included Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar; deputy Chief Minister Francis d’Souza; Sripad Naik, MP; Mahadev Naik, MLA; State unit chief Vinay Tendulkar; V Satish; Smriti Irani, and others.