Union Finance Minister and BJP leader Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday urged people to reject the DMK which, she said, was doing politics with “drug money”.
She was campaigning in Hosur for C. Narasimhan, the BJP candidate for the Krishnagiri Lok Sabha constituency. Speaking in Telugu and Tamil, she said it was doubtful whether the DMK or the Congress had raised issues relating to Krishnagiri or Hosur in Parliament.
The BJP is the ruling party at Centre, but it had implemented various schemes in the States ruled by Opposition parties, she said.
Replying to Chief Minister M.K. Stalin’s charge that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was visiting Tamil Nadu like a migratory bird, Ms. Sitharaman felt the comparison was wrong. In the country, “anyone shall come anywhere”.
According to her, the Prime Minister was bringing industries to Tamil Nadu but the DMK was coming for the alleged collection. While the Prime Minister announced the Defence Corridor in 2019, Hosur was one of the points on it. The defence products exported through these Defence Corridors fetched ₹20,000 crore. Hosur and Krishnagiri accounted for a major share.
Claiming that there was evidence to link the alleged drug trafficking kingpin, Jaffer Sadiq, to a family in the DMK, Ms. Sitharaman said that through drugs, they wanted to earn crores and crores of rupees.
Listing the schemes that benefited Krishnagiri district, the Minister said that under the Pradhan Mantri Mudra Yojana, ₹27 lakh crore was distributed to 47 crore people across the country and in Krishnagiri alone, 6.30 lakh people received ₹5,927 crore. Under the Stand Up India scheme, 465 people in Krishnagiri got ₹60 crore in loans. Under the PM SVANidhi scheme, 63 lakh street vendors got loans across the country and in Krishnagiri alone, 4,000 got the loans. Under the Jal Jeevan Mission, 2.75 lakh people receive drinking water in the district, while 11 crore people receive water across the country. Under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, 18,600 houses were built in rural areas and 7,460 people received their houses in urban areas of the district. Under the Ayushman Bharat scheme, 2.5 lakh families benefited in the district, she added.
Explaining what she described as the Prime Minister’s “affection towards farmers”, the Finance Minister said the Union government gives ₹6,000 to farmers every year. The BJP government only opened factories in Bihar and Jharkhand to manufacture urea for farmers. Three years before, a bag of fertilizer was imported for ₹3,000 during COVID-19. But the Prime Minister instructed that the price of fertilizer not be increased even if import cost was very high and ordered that a bag of fertilizer be sold to farmers for ₹298. This showed how the Prime Minister respected farmers, she said.
