NEW DELHI: India’s ruling Congress party on Thursday likened opposition front-runner in the ongoing elections to the late Pakistani dictator and religious zealot Ziaul Haq among other dictators who it said Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi resembled.

The comment by a Congress spokesman stressed that Mr Modi, who watched the massacre of 2000 Muslims in 2002 at the start of his innings as head of Gujarat, was in the league of “dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, Idi Amin and Ziaul Haq.”

On the occasion, the Congress released a three-year-old CD in which BJP leader Uma Bharti is quoted as describing Mr Modi as evil incarnate.

In the audio-visual presentation, Ms Bharti who was then heading Bharatiya Janshakti Party after briefly parting ways with BJP, says that she never saw “Hindus so frightened as in Gujarat” and that “Gujarat has become a fear-stricken state”.

The CD, which Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi admitted was of a period when Bharti was not in the BJP, shows the firebrand leader debunking the development claims of the Gujarat chief minister as well his Hindutva pitch.

“I know him since 1973… He is not a Vikas Purush but a Vinash Purush. His claim of GDP growth and the uplift of people from the BPL to APL category is fake…In the last five years, Gujarat became a bigger debter. Gujarat got neither Ram nor Roti. It should be freed from the Vinash Purush.

“It is media which has made Modi so big, inflated the balloon. Since it is you who have inflated the balloon, you will have to deflate it,” Mr Bharti says in the video.

Replying to questions on why the party released this CD in the middle of the election, the Congress spokesman Mr. Manu Singhvi said that though this was not the primary focus of the AICC press conference it does show that “there are thousands of such persons in the BJP, who consider him a dictator, a Vinash Purush (a man of destruction) and his claims about the development of Gujarat are fake.”