New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi told the Lok Sabha, “This government also needs improvement which cannot happen without your help. I am new, you are experienced. I need the benefit of your experience. Governments will come and go. Let us work shoulder to shoulder.”
He said a democratic country like India could not be left at the mercy of the bureaucracy as he sought to underline the legislature’s importance, saying even a single MP of any party should be treated “like a prime minister”.
But Mr Modi made no mention of burning issues that were raised by Rahul Gandhi and several other leaders over the past few days, including the JNU row, black money, the suicide of dalit scholar Rohith Vemula, and his visit to Pakistan in December 2015. Instead, the PM trained his guns at the Congress, attacking it for its failure to curb poverty over the past 60 years.
“You (Congress) boldly say that during the elections I had promised to rid the country of poverty. But you made poverty so deep-rooted that it is difficult to uproot it... You must be saying ‘Modi, you yourself will be uprooted but poverty will not go’ ... Still, we are making efforts. To uproot poverty, a lot of efforts need to be made. I realised how deep-rooted poverty is only when I came here (after becoming PM),” the former Gujarat CM said.
Asking the Congress to accept that it brought the country to such a pass, Mr Modi said had there been no poverty, there would have been no need for MNREGA. Taking on the Congress, he said it was suffering from a “feeling of jealousy” as it was concerned why the NDA government was doing “well”. He said the Congress was worried as “what we could not do in 60 years, how could you do it?”
He compared the performance of his government with the UPA governments, particularly in constructing roads and the implementation of MNREGA.
