Congress moves motion over PM’s Goa speech

However, given the change of guard in the Speaker’s Office with Shiv Sena leader Manohar Joshi set to be elected tomorrow, it is unlikely that there will be much progress on the Congress notice.

The Congress charge pertains to one controversial sentence. According to the clarification made by Vajpayee in the Lok Sabha on the speech, he used the phrase ‘‘aise Mussalman (such Muslims)’’ to single out fundamentalist Muslims as those who cannot mingle with the rest of society. He insisted he was not referring to the Muslim community as a whole.

However, the Congress today claimed that the word ‘‘aise’’ was an ‘‘after-thought’’ and a ‘‘deliberate inclusion’’. It was not there in the original speech, Congress spokesman Jaipal Reddy said.

He said that the party has procured a copy of the original text as well as a video cassette and there is a ‘‘substantive contradiction’’ between what the PM quoted in the Lok Sabha and waht he actually said in Goa. ‘‘It is tantamount to a breach of privilege as he has misled the House,’’ Reddy declared.

Realising that it may be tilting at windmills, the Congress has gone ahead with the privilege notice anyway to keep the pressure on the Government on its overt return to Hindutva in the aftermath of the communal violence in Gujarat.