Modi tells Congress where it stands precisely
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not known to pull punches, and he did not on Thursday in the lok Sabha, while rounding up the discussion on the Motion of Thanks to the President's address. The problem for the Congress is that while Mr Modi finds new templates to hit out at his rivals, the Congress remains stuck in the old groove, churning out off-note and stale tunes. Thus, while the Prime Minister holds up the issues of disruption of Parliament's proceedings and obstruction of key Bills by the opposition party, the Congress harks back to non-issues like chai pe charcha, ridicules national programmes such as Make in India, and comments on foreign policy without having an understanding of the Government's functioning on the matter. Since the Congress is fixated on condemning the Modi regime, it's not surprising that there has been very little contribution from the party in terms of positive ideas to set right what it thinks is going wrong with the Government’s initiatives. As replacement, there has been misguided belligerence from senior members of the Congress, with nobody in the end any wiser on what precisely has been achieved. It is to this attitude that the Prime Minister referred as the Opposition's “inferiority complex”. This term is defined as “an unrealistic feeling of general inadequacy caused by actual or supposed inferiority in one sphere, sometimes marked by aggressive behaviour in compensation”. Peruse any of the speeches that prominent Congress leaders have given and you get the feeling that the party is seeking to camouflage its shortcomings through needless aggression and, worse, misplaced sarcasm. Congress vice president and member of Parliament Rahul Gandhi's Wednesday jibe of “babbar sher” with reference to Make in India and the “fair and lovely” ridicule to claim that the Government's new policy to flush out black money was a ploy to convert black money into white, may have produced smirks from his faithful, but they were nothing more than products of shallow thinking. The large number of occasions Mr Gandhi invoked the Prime Minister's name (Modiji this and Modiji that) demonstrated his obsession with an individual and not the Government's policies and programmes — an incongruous continuity from the election campaign days. By contrast, the Prime Minister barely referred to the Congress leader by name; on one occasion he actually complimented Mr Gandhi for his contribution to the debate.
Yet, Mr Modi's address was more pointed in its (informed) criticism of the Congress's position. No one can deny that the need to build toilets in every school across the country (especially for girls), the target to provide 100 per cent rural electrification, and the aim to give financial inclusivity to the last man in the line, are challenges that remained largely unaddressed in the nearly seven decades since independence — the Congress was in power for much of this period. Bipartisan observers accept that the Congress has blocked crucial legislations such as the GST Bill for no good reason. Therefore, while the Prime Minister has exposed the Congress's game-plan, the people of this country too have been judging for themselves in a similar vein.