New Delhi: Making a sharp attack on Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi on Friday claimed the Congress had never given the country a PM who was a prisoner of his own image, who based his entire policy making strategy on TRPs.
Gandhi made these comments while chairing a Parliamentary Party Meeting of his party's Members of Parliament in both Houses in Delhi.
Gandhi added that unlike the BJP, the grand old party never had a PM who bypassed the experience of those sitting in democratic institutions while taking decisions.
“The country has suffered tremendous damage as a result of the vanity and incompetence of our PM,” Rahul thundered.
Speaking about cross-border terrorism, Gandhi said it was high time the government developed a coherent strategy.
“We were told that idea behind surgical strikes was to stop Pak from cross border attacks. There have been 21 major attacks and hundreds of ceasefire violations since the strikes,” Rahul said.
“85 soldiers have been martyred, thats the highest number of men we have lost in almost a decade,” Rahul said.
Taking on Modi for his handling of the Kashmir unrest, Rahul claimed that the PM had created a political vacuum that gives terrorists the space to operate in the state.
“Today the same person who used to ridicule us sits silently while Kashmir burns. Modi will be judged by history as man who gifted massive political space to anti-India forces by creating opportunistic BJP-PDP alliance,” the Congress vice-president stated.
"Listening to the voices of the people of this country is the only thing that can free him from the clutches of his own image and make him an effective Prime Minister. Yet he consistently refuses to do so," he said.
Accusing Modi of single handedly declaring a war on the world's fastest growing economy due to the "catastrophic experiment" of demonetisation which is "badly conceived and incompetently implemented", he said its results will soon be revealed to the entire world.
"Every economist of repute has already condemned it and questioned its capacity to realize the goals it is supposed to achieve. Modiji has created a massive new corrupt black market that is working overtime to convert the black money to white," he charged.
Gandhi said the PM "confused" India's entire cash economy with black economy and demonetised 86 percent of Indian bank notes and decided to experiment with the financial future of 1.3 billion people.
"All cash is not black money and all black money is not cash," he said, adding that instead of attacking black money, he attacked the very foundations of the country's economy.
Although the Parliamentary Party Meeting is normally chaired by Congress president Sonia Gandhi, her son Rahul chaired the meeting for the first time in the absence of her mother, who was recently admitted to a Delhi hospital with some ailment.
