Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday sent his wishes to the Narendra Modi-led NDA Government on its first anniversary with words laden with sarcasm. “I would like to officially wish the suit-boot ki Sarkar a very happy birthday,” he said. Unleashing a scathing attack against the Modi Government with references to its alleged affinity to hype, he said that the people of the country “will take a decision that it will not celebrate five birthday parties” if it continued to pursue its current anti-farmer, anti-fishermen and anti-people policies.
Giving a new expansion to the much-celebrated abbreviation NAMO, he said in the Kerala city of Kozhikode, “What kind of a Government do you have hereIJ You have got a No Action, Maximum Oratory Sarkar... So I want to tell the Government: Please stop the oratory and start action.” Addressing a rally organized as part of the State conference of the Youth Congress, the Congress leader said that the Modi Government had not been able to fulfill any of the promises it had made to the people before the election. “They promised you more jobs. Statistics show that job creation in the country had slowed down by 30 percent in the past one year,” he claimed.
Attacking the Modi Government on issues like land acquisition, fisheries policy, price rise and corruption, Gandhi alleged that the NDA regime had been a failure on all such fronts. “Modiji speaks about corruption. But all the agencies that deal with issues of corruption in the country remain headless under him,” he said.
Alleging that the Government was for some reason firm on changing the UPA’s land Acquisition Bill, he said it wanted to take away the poor farmers’ land for the benefit of “two or three industrialist friends”. “The PM tells you that he has reduced corruption. But I tell you that this is the single biggest corruption,” Rahul said. “The Finance Ministry was asked: How many projects have been stalled because of problems in land acquisition. We expected it to be 80 or 90 per cent. But the Ministry itself says that only eight percent have been stalled,” the Congress leader said, adding that Modi wanted to help his industrialist friends.