Gadkari backs Ramdev on black money,writes to PM

With the UPA government reaching out to Baba Ramdev,the BJP hurriedly came out in support of his campaign over black money.

With the UPA government reaching out to Baba Ramdev,the BJP on Tuesday hurriedly came out in support of his campaign over black money. In doing so,the party hopes to strike a chord with the popular yoga guru’s huge following in the Hindi heartland and revive its attack on the UPA on the issue of black money which lost steam after L K Advani had to express regret to Sonia Gandhi for a party-appointed task force’s charge that her family held “secret” Swiss bank accounts.

On Tuesday,party chief Nitin Gakdari wrote to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh urging him to accept Ramdev’s “just and reasonable demands for urgent steps” to bring back black money stashed abroad and “punish the tainted and make strict anti-graft laws”. He also asked the Prime Minister to invite the yoga guru for a “meaningful dialogue” before it is too late and “assure him that an effective foolproof mechanism on the lines suggested by him would be put in place immediately”.

The BJP,which had raised the black money issue in a big way in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections in 2009,almost fell silent after the task force report fiasco in February. Many in party at that time felt that Advani should not have expressed regret and admitted that the development took the sting out of the BJP’s attack. Now the party hopes to piggyride Ramdev’s proposed fast unto death to resurrect its campaign. It had backed Anna Hazare’s campaign as well believing that there was an urban,middle-class upsurge across the country.

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Gadkari also praised Ramdev in the letter made public by his party. From calling Ramdev “the spiritual icon” who has been in the “vanguard of the crusade against the scourge of corruption in general and black money in particular” to dubbing him the “rock star of yoga”.

“We in the BJP have every reason to believe Baba Ramdev’s assertion that black money to the tune of Rs 400 lakh crore is lying in several international banks. His assessment has been corroborated by several experts in this field,” he said.

A “mere creation of a wing under the Central Board of Direct Taxes to track and prosecute economic offenders is not going to solve this monumental problem. Nor would issuing appeals to the yoga guru to give up his plan is going to defuse the threatening crisis,” Gadkari added.

The RJD’s key face and Leader of the Opposition (LoP) Tejashwi Yadav, party supremo Lalu Yadav’s son, will again contest from his stronghold Raghopur.

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