Opposition parties on Wednesday said the Cabinet reshuffle exercise was not driven by performance or governance but meant for “distribution of the spoils of power” and “adjustment” of defectors.
While the Congress said the Finance Minister, Home Minister and the Defence Minister too should have been axed as they failed in their respective roles, Trinamool Congress said when the full cupboard is in bad shape, what do you do by just changing the cabinet.
Samajwadi Party Chief Akhilesh Yadav said that the overhaul reflect that the government so far is failure and such cosmetic changes will hardly do anything untill the complete train is changed. Yadav who face a major challenge in the next year assembly elections against BJP was also critical the all segment of the society were not represented in the reshuffle. Congress chief spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said if the cabinet expansion was to be done on the basis of performance then the prime minister should have been the first one to be removed for his failures in providing governance.
“The present cabinet expansion is not performance or governance driven, but is a distribution of spoils of power and defectors adjustmentprogramme,” Congress said in a statement. “Overall, this cabinet expansion is not a performance appraisal.
It is only a means of serving the interests of their allies and not for the country. But when will there be an appraisal of PM Modi’s performance who brought the nation to the brink of poverty after turning away from its responsibility in the Corona epidemic,” asked Surjewala. If performance and governance were the criteria then the first person to be sacked should be Modi as he has brought the government and the entire country to a standstill, he said.
“Progress and peace and harmony have been thrown into the dustbin of history and the present prime minister would be remembered as an autocrat, who decimated India’s economy, who ensured India was pushed into an abyss of unemployment and who ensured that India’s strength as the super power of the 21st century was grossly undermined,” the Congress leader alleged. Surjewala also said if performance and governance were the criteria, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, Home Minister Amit Shah and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman too should be sacked, citing their failures to tackle the border standoff with China in eastern Ladakh.