I am not a mentor of Rahul, says Digvijay

[1]

Senior Congress leader Digvijay Singh on Saturday said he was neither a mentor nor adviser to fellow party General Secretary Rahul Gandhi as commonly perceived.

"The only relationship that I share with Rahul is that he is an MP from Uttar Pradesh a state whose in-charge I am for the Congress," Singh told PTI. No one in the Congress has ever said or announced that I am an adviser or mentor of Rahul but still the "myth" continues, he said.

"I think it is time that Rahul becomes the Prime Minister. Rahul is now 41, and he has been working for the party for the last seven to eight years. However, all this will be decided by him only," Singh had told PTI last month.

Meanwhile, clarifying his stand on terrorism, the Congress general secretary said he was against fundamentalists of all types, irrespective of religion. He said it was incorrect to blame him for targeting only hardline Hindu outfits for terrorism.

"As Madhya Pradesh chief minister I was equally tough with both Bajrang Dal and SIMI."

Singh, who has often courted controversies for his utterances, said Congress president Sonia Gandhi had never sought any clarification from him about those statements.

"The only time she said something was when I wrote an article on Union Home Minister P Chidambaram," he added.

Singh had stoked a controversy last year by calling Chidambaram as "intellectually arrogant". He, however, later expressed regrets over the remark.