Lucknow: Defence Minister and BJP Lok Sabha candidate from Lucknow Rajnath Singh Tuesday said India's stature has increased all over the world and when the country expresses its views at the international level, the whole world listens with open ears.
Addressing an election rally here, Singh, who is also the sitting MP from Lucknow, said, 'Be it (former prime ministers) Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi or Manmohan Singh, whoever formed the government, everyone said that we want to remove poverty from India, but poverty could not be eliminated from India.
"But I can say with certainty that ever since Modi ji has taken the responsibility as the prime minister, a miracle has happened in India and within 10 years, 25 crore people have been brought out of the poverty line," Singh said.
He said India was considered a weak and a poor country. But today, when India expresses its views at the international level, the whole world listens with open ears to what India is saying.
"India's stature has increased all over the world. Earlier, India's views were not seriously listened to at the international level," he said.
Referring to the war between Ukraine and Russia, Singh said when there was a war between the two countries, missiles and bombs were being fired from both the sides. The lives of many Indian students, who were studying there, were in danger, he said.
"Our prime minister talked to both the countries and the war was stopped for four-and-a-half hours. And, all the Indian students living there came back to India safely. This is our Prime Minister Narendra Modi," he said.
Singh also said ever since Independence was achieved in India, elections -- sometimes assembly elections and sometimes Lok Sabha elections -- have been going on continuously.
"Every party wants to win the election but the BJP is a party which contests not to form the government but to build the country. Hence, we have decided that assembly and Lok Sabha elections should be held simultaneously in the entire country and we will complete this work in the next five years," Singh said, apparently referring to One Nation, One Election system.
He also said today, the BJP is not only the biggest party in India, but also in the world, and exuded confidence that the saffron party will cross the tally of 400 Lok Sabha seats in the parliamentary elections.
Lucknow will go to polls on May 20, in the fifth phase of the Lok Sabha elections.
The other 13 seats going to polls in the fifth phase in the state are -- Mohanlalganj (SC), Rae Bareli, Amethi, Jalaun (SC), Jhansi, Hamirpur, Banda, Fatehpur, Kaushambi (SC), Barabanki (SC), Faizabad, Kaisarganj and Gonda.
Earlier, speaking at a programme 'Samrasta Kaaryakram', Singh said every child of India knows that Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel played an important role in uniting India, the Lucknow Mahanagar unit of the BJP quoting him said in a statement.
Singh said "perhaps the India, which we are seeing, we would not have got". There were some princely states which were not ready to merge. The result of Sardar Patel's policy was that one Bharat could become one ('ek Bharat, ek ho sakaa'), he said.
Singh said after becoming the prime minister in 2014, Modi decided to build the tallest statue of Patel.
The tallest statue was constructed by collecting material from the farmers and the common people from every village of India, he said.
The defence minister also said all the governments of independent India till now have contributed to the development in some way or the other. But the work that has been done at such a fast pace under the leadership of Prime Minister Modi has never happened before, he added.
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