Prime Minister Narendra Modi is known for his gift of the gab and he displayed it once again during his over an hour-long reply February 7 to the debate on the Motion of Thanks to the President’s address. He is also known to be an expert in sidestepping main issues with theatrics, twisting facts, conveniently forgetting his own actions in the past and ridiculing the Congress. For, he lashed out at the Congress and its leader Rahul Gandhi instead of answering Opposition’s charges on the high inflation rate, unprecedented unemployment and alleged mismanagement of the pandemic. He used the Parliament, as he has done in the past, to deliver emotive election speeches without offering concrete evidence to counter the Opposition’s allegations. The PM glibly went on bashing the Congress and comparing his government’s performance with the record of previous Congress rule starting from Jawaharlal Nehru down to the UPA government.
The Opposition too is failing badly. For instance, when Rahul Gandhi tries to taunt the government on its crony capitalist policies of encouraging just a couple of industrial houses who are favourites of the Prime Minister, he does not dare to clearly spell out how he would do it differently, or change what he thinks are current mistakes, if he ever comes to power. An example is the way Rahul spoke about the Modi government offering all ports and airports all over the country to only one company. He tried to point out this monopolisation but did not spell out if he would take back the public funded infrastructure units from the singular private player if he came to power. This kind of namby-pamby smoke drill will obviously leave no impression in the minds of the average young Indian voter about any alternatives.
Also Read
People across the length and breadth of this country are aware that voting for BJP is voting for Hindutva and all its side effects. On the other hand, no one is certain what voting for Congress would imply. The side-talk that is doing the rounds about the Gandhi family, including Robert Vadra, being protected and paid for by the BJP leadership to remain as they are, no more seems to be a joke.
The country is infinitely larger than a political entity called the Congress and the PM’s speech should have been on addressing grave problems facing the country such as inflation, joblessness, a collapsing economy and monumental sufferings of the people due to inept government handling of the pandemic. The PM did not speak directly on what had caused inflationary pressures on the Indian economy, but merely mentioned how supply chain and logistics support systems across the world have collapsed. He even went as far back in history as the Korean war and said that Jawaharlal Nehru had supposedly claimed that inflation in India was because of the war in Korea. While the mention of such invaluable historical statements could be amusing to a student of history, those who support such inane opinions probably could argue that Nehru’s faulty policies were responsible for the Indian economy fairing badly today. Somehow, these people conveniently forget that the present party in power takes great pride in its singular achievement of scrapping thousands of outdated laws. If that is an achievement, then all the bad laws of Nehru era should have also been done away with by now.
On the all-important issue of increasing joblessness, Modi skirted Opposition criticism that his government’s decisions over the last few years such as Demonetization, a flawed Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime and lack of support to MSMEs were primarily responsible for precipitating the largest-ever unemployment rate in over 50 years. Instead of taking the Opposition head-on on this matter, Modi spoke of his government’s ‘vision’ and blamed previous governments for propagating the idea that the government is the only ‘bhagya vidhaata’, meaning that only the government can shape people’s lives by creating job opportunities. “The thought has impeded Indian youth’s ‘kaushal’ (skill) and dreams. The political class has only encouraged such an egotistic thought. No, the government doesn’t have to do everything,” he said. Although this idea is very reasonable, this is also a classic case of the government disowning its responsibility to provide livelihood to the people leaving them at the mercy of private capital.
The PM’s intention to turn the Parliament into a platform for electioneering was most evident in his unfounded claim that the Congress, the Aam Aadmi Party and the Shiv Sena were responsible for spreading the coronavirus by providing train and bus tickets for daily wage earning migrants who desperately needed to get to their villages in the face of the first, sudden lockdown he had announced in March 2020. “You people (pointing at the Opposition benches) pushed the labourers into difficulties,” he said. But, this was an egregious statement since everyone knew most migrant labourers were thrown into a survival crisis after the PM announced the lockdown giving the people only four hours to prepare for it. And it was the Prime Minister’s personal decision to bring back thousands of stranded Indians from many coronavirus infected countries starting with the first flight from Wuhan of China, the birth centre of the virus.
Prevarication, deliberate forgetfulness and election rhetoric should not be what the Prime Minister offers while replying on the Motion of Thanks to the President for his address in the Parliament.
