BJP leader Subramanian Swamy on Saturday sought to downplay his threat of a “bloodbath”, words he used in reaction to Union minister Arun Jaitley’s advice.
BJP leader Subramanian Swamy on Saturday sought to downplay his threat of a “bloodbath”, words he used in reaction to Union minister Arun Jaitley’s advice. In a Twitter post on Thursday, Dr Swamy had written, “People giving me unasked for advice of discipline and restraint don’t realise that if I disregard discipline there would be a blood bath.” This post was seen as a veiled attack on Mr Jaitley who had urged politicians for restraint and discipline in the wake of Dr Swamy’s attacks on chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian and economic affairs secretary Shaktikanta Das.
Dr Swamy said in Thiruvananthapuram when asked about his “bloodbath” statement that he did not intend the literal meaning of the word, but only hinted at the “chaos” which had not happened. He said his usage of the word had been taken in the literal sense of bloodshed. The BJP leadership is miffed with Dr Swamy over his tirade against the finance ministry’s top bureaucrats and his apparent attack on Mr Jaitley.
Earlier during the day, Dr Swamy advised Robert Vadra, Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law, to concentrate on “staying out of jail” instead of making political comments after the latter took a dig at him over his “condescending and derogatory” remarks about waiters. Hitting back at Mr Vadra, the BJP leader said the latter was pained as his mother was a waitress in a restaurant in England. Mr Vadra also described Dr Swamy as the “attention seeking BJP MP”.
In a Twitter post on Friday, Dr Swamy had asked the BJP leadership to “direct” Union ministers to “wear traditional and modernised Indian clothes while abroad” as in “coat and tie they look like waiters.”
His tweet was seen as an apparent dig at Mr Jaitley, who is in China for a business forum, but he clarified that he did not target anybody.
Replying to questions about his “shifting” from one party to another, Dr Swamy said that there was a time when the late Jayaprakash Narayan used to attack the RSS and then he came to the conclusion that the organisation had evolved to a point where without it democracy could not be restored. He also referred to the Congress bringing down the Gujral government on the Rajiv Gandhi assassination issue and later tying up with the DMK. “I can go on giving you names, parties which held positions and then after new material comes into existence, change it. Now neither the RSS minds what I said nor am I opposed to what the BJP said about me....We nationalist forces had to come together because there was a danger,” said Dr Swamy and alleged that Mrs Gandhi had tried to declare a state of emergency in 2011-12 “cooking up this Hindu terror basis”.
