New Delhi: Opposition MPs Thursday staged a protest in Parliament House complex over the India-US interim trade deal, accusing the government of surrendering Indian interests.
Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, AICC general secretaries K C Venugopal and Jairam Ramesh, DMK’s TR Baalu, SP’s Dharmendra Yadav and Jaya Bachchan, CPI-ML’s Sudama Prasad, among others, participated in the protest near the Makar Dwar of Parliament.
With a huge banner that read trap deal and carrying ‘Narender Surrender’ posters, the MPs raised slogans such as US deal hai atyachari and desh ko bechna bandh karo.
Later, Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, along with other Congress MPs, including those who have been recently suspended, stood on the steps of Makar Dwar and protested against the government over the deal.
Earlier in the day, Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi alleged that the government ignored the voices of workers and farmers while making decisions concerning their future and asked whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi will listen to them now or if there is a grip on him too strong.
Gandhi’s attack on the government came a day after he alleged that the India-US interim trade deal was a wholesale surrender, with India’s energy security handed over to America and farmers’ interests compromised.
In a no-holds-barred attack on the Modi government, Gandhi, while participating in the debate on the Union Budget in the Lok Sabha Wednesday, claimed that Indian interests had been surrendered under the trade deal to protect the BJP’s financial architecture.
Slamming the Indo-US deal, Gandhi drew an analogy of how, in martial arts, after securing a grip, the next step is a chokehold, and then the opponent taps to give up.
Gandhi underlined the need to protect the country’s people, data, food supply and energy system.
He said that if an INDIA bloc government negotiated the trade agreement with the US, it would have told President Donald Trump that he must treat India equally.