Senior Congress leader Shaktisinh Gohil has said that renaming the Motera Sardar Patel Stadium as Narendra Modi Stadium was an insult to the great freedom fighter. He was reacting to the BJP’s allegations that the Congress was not fair to Sardar Patel.
Speaking to reporters in Rajkot, Gohil said, “I believe that India’s prime minister is not the prime minister of the BJP alone. He is also my prime minister. A few people who wanted to endear themselves to him removed Sardar Patel’s name from the cricket stadium in Motera and named it after the prime minister.”
Gohil said that he was “not ready to believe that Narendrabhai could have stooped so low as to ask for such a change in name”. “I request him to convey to such people that the insult of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel won’t be tolerated, and that only the name of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the pride of Gujarat, can be the befitting one at that stadium,” he said.
Recently, PM Modi was at the Statue Of Unity, where he asked whether the “grand old party was failing to connect itself with Sardar Patel”. He was referring to an advertisement issued by the Congress government in Rajasthan that had neither the name nor the image of Patel on his birth anniversary.
Gohil said that Sardar Patel was called the ‘Iron Man of India’ because Mahatma Gandhi had termed him as a man who would fight as hard as iron against injustice. “Were he subjected to injustice, Sardar saheb would not have continued with the Congress,” he said.
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