Union Home Minister Amit Shah claimed Sunday that senior Congress leader Sonia Gandhi spent at least 70% of her MP funds on minorities and urged the people of Rae Bareli to choose a local candidate who will remain within them and not an outsider who will go "missing" for the next five years. Addressing a rally, Shah said, “You gave the Gandhi family chances for years, but no development work was done. The ‘shahzada’ (prince) has come here to seek votes. You have been voting for many years. Have you received anything from the MP fund? If you have not received it, then where did it go? It went to their vote bank. Sonia Gandhi has spent more than 70% of the MP funds on minorities.” Accusing the Gandhi family of being an expert in lying, he added, “They are now promising Rs 1 lakh for every woman. In the Telangana (Assembly) polls, they promised Rs 15,000 for every woman. The people of Rae Bareli have made the Gandhi and Nehru family win for years. But after getting elected from here, how many times did Sonia ji and her family come to Rae Bareli?" Shah, who also addressed election meetings in Pratapgarh and Gonda of UP, accused the Opposition of doing appeasement politics, saying Sonia, Rahul, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav and his wife Dimple Yadav were invited to the consecration ceremony at the Ram temple in Ayodhya but they did not attend. “These people did not go because they were afraid of their vote bank. But the BJP is not afraid of vote bank,” he said. Shah termed the Opposition’s assertion that reservation would end if the BJP wins 400 seats as a "lie" and claimed that after the Congress came to power in Karnataka and Telangana, its governments gave reservations to Muslims overnight by cutting the share of SC, ST and OBCs. “Today, I am stating the 'Modi ki guarantee'. till the time the BJP has even a single MP, we will not allow scrapping of reservation for SC, ST and OBCs," Shah said. Referring to Congress leader Mani Shankar Aiyar’s remarks on Pakistan having the atom bomb, he said Rahul Gandhi might be scared of the neighbouring country’s atom bomb but the BJP is not. Pakistan-occupied Kashmir belongs to India and “we will take it”, he said. At Pratapgarh, Shah alleged that Congress, SP and the BSP were “taking care of Article 370 as their ‘illegitimate child’.”
