A war of words between the Congress and the Aam Aadmi Party continued on June 25, days after the senior leaders of the two parties failed to find common ground at the meeting of Opposition parties in Patna. Senior Congress leader Ajay Maken said that Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was seeking the support of the Congress party to defeat the ordinance over the control of services brought in by the Centre but was “unabashedly ridiculing senior leaders of the party”.
Chief national spokesperson of the AAP Priyanka Kakkar replied that Congress leaders including Mr. Maken and former MP Sandeep Dixit had also made statements against the AAP and that “respect is a two-way street”.
“Mr. Kejriwal’s Ministers place prerequisites on our alliance, while their chief spokesperson publicly disparages our party and leaders on the day of all Opposition party meeting. To brazenly criticize and then demand support, is this how alliances are sought, Mr. Kejriwal?” Mr. Maken tweeted.
He added that the Delhi Chief Minister’s political manoeuvres in the recent weeks had left many baffled. “His desperate attempts to evade imprisonment on corruption charges, wherein two of his colleagues are already jailed, are reasons for these actions. His proclamations of Opposition unity are not for cohesion but a calculated move to sabotage it and curry favour with the BJP,” Mr. Maken said.
The Congress leader said that the AAP fought elections in Goa, Gujarat, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Assam “just to help the BJP” and accused the party of using ill-gotten funds to sabotage the Congress party by fighting elections in these States.
Ms. Kakkar in turn, questioned why Mr. Maken was objecting to the AAP contesting elections when the Congress could not defeat the BJP in Gujarat for the last 30 years.
“Will Mr. Kejriwal be blamed for the Congress party’s failures in Gujarat? AAP did not contest elections in Assam, Nagaland, Puducherry, Tripura, Meghalaya, Sikkim, Manipur, Arunachal, then why Congress lost there?,” Ms. Kakkar said in reply.
