New Delhi:Congress on Monday dubbed AAP as “Arvind Advertisement Party” by latching on to a RTI reply revealing that a whopping Rs 14.5 crore was spent on newspaper advertisements alone by the Delhi government in the last three months.
Congress spokesperson Shobha Oza told reporters that as per the reply, the Aam Aadmi Party government is spending Rupees 16 lakh a day on newspaper ads, in and outside Delhi.
“This shows that AAP is nothing but Arvind Advertisement Party”, she said adding that the Delhi government has yet not given the amount spent on TV, radio ads and publicity hoardings which was sought under the Right to Information act.
“As per our calculation, in just 3 months, Kejriwal has spent approximately Rs 100 crores on all sorts of ads”, she said alleging that he has been “wasting” huge sums of taxpayer’s money on “self glorification and misleading advertisements.”
Oza alleged it was a “blatant misuse” of Delhi taxpayers’ money to put up ads in Kerala, Bangalore, Chennai and other cities.
She said the irony is that Kejriwal doesn’t have money to pay the salary of poor sanitation workers, old age and widow pensions and even the pension of disabled people have been delayed for months.
Besides, she claimed that such huge advertisement contracts will also have an effect on the neutrality of media houses. “By virtue of such enormous funding by government, the media is under pressure to not talk about the opposition and even overlook public issues on which the government is on a sticky wicket. It’s white collar corruption”, she said.
Oza said that the Modi government is no different as it has spent Rs 27 lakh/per day on advertisements. She claimed that the UPA in its last 5 years in power had spent only Rs 3.8 lakh/per day.
She took a dig at finance minister Arun Jaitley’s suggestion apparently hitting at AAP that excessive advertisement is acquiring the proportion of political bribing. “We would like to tell Jaitley - the biggest “political bribe” in the history of political India” is the promise of “acche din”, she remarked.
