New Delhi: The Rajya Sabha was, on Friday, adjourned after Congress members vehemently protested against certain ‘insulting’ remarks against Prime Minister Manmohan Singh by NDA Convener and former Union Minister George Fernandes.
Under strong attack from the ruling Congress over his statement against Prime Minister, George Fernandes on Friday refused to apologise for it.
Fernandes' statement on Thursday that Singh had ‘betrayed’ the nation by ‘continuous bluffing’ on the Indo-US nuclear deal and if it were in China they would have settled it with one bullet in his head.
After the issue rocked Parliament, reporters asked the former Defence Minister whether he would apologise for his statement.
"What should I apologise for," he said.
"What I have said in the statement is that the way our Prime Minister had spoken lies, had an American President done that he would have been removed. And had someone done that in China, he would have been shot dead by a bullet," he said.
Asked whether he implied that the Prime Minister was corrupt, he said "I have not called the Prime Minister corrupt. You have my statement. These are not my words - you only spread lies. Now you will run these words as mine."
Fernandes also released copies of a letter he had written to Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee in which he had referred to members of the ruling benches saying that his remarks were an "inciting statement" against the Prime Minister.
"No one reading my statement in its entirety including the Prime Minister himself will come to such a conclusion," he claimed.
About the treasury benches demand that he should seek pardon becuse it has hurt the prime minister's honour, Fernandes said as defence minister for almost six years in the NDA government the Congress party had carried on a campaign against him with lies at the insistence of Congress President Sonia Gandhi.
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