Lok Sabha polls 2014: Bofors lawyer lines up Vadra fire for Sonia Gandhi

NEW DELHI: It's a David vs Goliath contest that is set to play out in UP's poll battleground.

A day after BJP announced its candidate in advocate Ajay Aggarwal against UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi from Rae Bareli, the man remained unfazed by the enormity of the task before him.

Lining up his strategy to take on one of the world's most powerful politicians in her pocket borough, the lawyer says he is confident of a good show. He brushes aside suggestions that BJP perhaps made him the sacrificial lamb by claiming an internal party survey threw up his name for the constituency.

As a lawyer, Aggarwal made his name as an anti-corruption crusader, filing PILs against the Bofors scam and Octavio Quattrochi and later seeking a probe into the Taj Corridor case. Another PIL demanded a CBI probe into the multi- crore fake stamp paper racket.

Pitted against Sonia Gandhi, Aggarwal wants to carry on with his plank of anti-corruption - this time targeting her son-in-law Robert Vadra. "If BJP comes to power we will prosecute him for his corrupt land deals. There is no doubt he could do all this only because he was shielded by Sonia Gandhi. I will raise the issue before the electorate in Rae Bareli. Vadra's prosecution and punishment must act like a deterrent for others," say the SC lawyer.

Why will the voters believe him, when just sometime back he was part of the Samajwadi Party? Aggarwal dismisses his defection to BJP as a 'non-issue'. "First, I joined SP when all MLA tickets had already been distributed. So becoming an MLA was never my intention. Since I went after Mayawati for her corruption, the natural alternative in UP was SP, particularly as BJP till even as late as 2012 was very weak in the state. But Akhilesh Yadav betrayed his voters who put so much hope in him. His government is also corrupt and when Muzaffarnagar riots occurred I decided to act."

Aggarwal claims he has found a Narendra Modi factor at work even in Rae Bareli and will benefit from it, even though the SP has already decided not to filed any candidate in the constituency. "There are a lot of people in Rae Bareli who went to work in Gujarat, saw how developed the state is and are now stand disillusioned with the Gandhi family. Rae Bareli doesn't have roads, no civic amenities, no decent medical facilities. Where is the development here?"