BJP President Amit Shah has become synonymous to gaffes during his public address in recent months. His latest gaffe has become a dominant theme of social media conversation after he addressed an ABP News journalist, Anurag Muskan, as Abhisar Sharma. Abhisar was forced to quit the channel last year allegedly due to his constant criticism of government policies.
Shah on Monday was attending ABP News channel’s Shikhar Sammelan conclave, where Muskan made a brief introduction to welcome Shah at the function. He highlighted how the BJP had plenty to answer for on the three big election promises that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had made during the 2014 parliamentary polls. Those three points, according to him, were Modi’s promise to curb the menace of black money, construction of the Ram Temple in Ayodhya and ‘teaching Pakistan a lesson’ for cross border terrorism. Muskan had also said that the BJP’s dream of having a Congress-free India had crashed after the saffron party lost governments in three key states, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.
Responding to Muskan’s observations, Shah told the programme’s anchor, Sumit Awasthi, “Abhisar ji said that our dreams have crashed. Abhisar ji doesn’t know the statistics and I want to inform ordinary citizens too. We formed the government at the Centre in 2014, we had governments in six states. Today we are going into the general elections with governments in 16 states.”
Shah also attacked journalists for criticising the government in order to boost the TRPs of their channel. Without naming a channel, he said, “Criticism of the government is fine, but not to run your channels or fulfill your political ambitions.”
Sharma was forced to leave ABP News last year along with two other journalists from the channel for allegedly criticising the Centre’s Narendra Modi government.
Reacting to Shah’s latest gaffe, Sharma tweeted, “How? He doesn’t even give me interviews, then how did I come into his thoughts?”
कैसे ? मुझे तो इंटरव्यू भी नही देते? फिर मेरा खयाल क्यों आया अमित जी को ? https://t.co/5ANVhYCRca
— Abhisar Sharma (@abhisar_sharma) February 25, 2019
Not so long ago, Shah had committed an embarrassing gaffe by ‘slamming’ his own government at the Centre for their incompetence in resolving national security issues of India. Speaking at a rally in Assam after the Pulwama terror attack, Shah said, “The deaths of 45 CRPF jawans will not go in vain because now we don’t have a Congress government at the Centre, now we have a government led by Narendra Modi, who you’ve elected. And the Narendra Modi government never resolves national security issues.”
Recently, he had famously addressed his popular spokesperson Sambit Patra as Sandeep Patra. During the Karnataka assembly polls last year, Shah was seen lashing out at his party colleagues for wrongly translating his Hindi speech in Kannada.