Team Herald
NEW DELHI: Bhartiya Janata Party President Amit Shah perhaps forgot Prime Minister Modi’s call of ‘Congress-Mukt Bharat’ to banish the Congress from the country in his 77-minute long maiden speech in the Rajya Sabha on Monday to visualise the Congress even returning to power.
In the presence of Modi sitting on the next bench in the House, Shah flayed the Congress for denigrating GST, urging it not to do something it has to repent later as “today we are in power, you may be tomorrow” as in a democracy the people can vote any party to power.
He referred to ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’ coined by Congress President Rahul Gandhi without mentioning his name, wondering how can a tax imposed by law with consensus of all parties is a dacoity to recall yesteryear’ dacoit Gabbar Singh. He accused the Congress of prompting people not to pay GST despite all decisions on it taken unanimously by the GST Council, which also includes the Congress finance ministers.
Shah was piloting a motion of thanks on the President’s address to the joint session of Parliament last Monday.
, but without mentions of the address except towards the end when he referred to President Ram Nath Kovind’s call for simultaneous Lok Sabha and Assembly elections. Let all parties have a good debate on it, he said.
His speech was otherwise political as the ruling party’s president, focused on the achievements of the Modi government since it came to power three-and-a-half years ago instead of limiting to the last one year’s record traced by President Kovind, tearing into the Congress over its criticism of GST and unemployment and making fun of Prime Minister Modi dubbing even one selling ‘pakodas’ as employed.
Shah took on former Congress finance minister P Chidambaram for his ‘pakoda’ jibe that even begging will be employment from the PM’s standard.
“Those selling pakodas are self-employed. Can you compare them with beggars,” he asked, pointing out that a “chaiwala’s (tea-seller’s) son has become the Prime Minister today.”
“No denial of unemployment as a big problem but it is despite 55 years of the Congress rule and did not crop up only during our time,” he said and pointed out how the government is trying to tackle it with programmes like skill India and Mudra Bank.
He referred to the private banks’ nationalisation by Indira Gandhi for the poor and said the banks’ doors, however, did not open for the poor until Modi came to power and brought the Mudra bank programme in which 10.5 crore youth got loans worth Rs 4.5 lakh crore at low interest rates and without guarantors that the poor can never have.
Shah dealt at length how the government has pursued all these years the principle of “Antyodaya” to reach benefits to the last man in the queue, starting with the Jan Dhan Yojana to have one bank account in every house. As many as 31 crore poor got the bank accounts for the first time, depositing Rs 73,000 crore that otherwise they had to store in home with all risks and there are now less than 20% who still have zero balance accounts, he pointed out.
Asserting that Modi rose above the vote bank politics to let people voluntarily give up the government benefits, he said it was then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri who persuaded people to sacrifice rice at least once in a week on Monday and now it is Modi who made 1.30 crore people give up cooking gas subsidy and used the savings to launch Ujjavala Yojana of providing the cooking gas cylinders to five crore poor women in five years. The target is now raised to 8 crore women beneficiaries as 3.30 crore have already got the gas connection, 30% of whom are Dalits and 13% Adivasis, Shah said.
He also referred to latrines in every home by 2022 and lauded the UP government for calling them “Ijjat Ghar” as giving confidence to women who need no longer defecate in open. He also referred to the government’s scheme for houses to all picking up steam, with clearance of 1.37 crore houses in the rural areas and 70 lakh in urban areas.
Shah won’t accept the bad state of the farmers as he insisted that the government was working on its promise to double their income, citing many schemes it had launched and that includes one-and-a-half time the production cost as the minimum support price (MSP) on every crop and hailing it as a “revolutionary steps in Azad India.”
On the Congress claiming GST as its baby that was then opposed by the BJP, Shah said most state governments opposed it since it had no trust in the UPA government that went back on compensation while the Modi government brought all together by promising 14% more revenue and 22 states are already getting it.
The Congress may have conceived it, but it is the Modi government that made the GST a reality as “one nation, one tax” replacing 17 taxes and 23 cesses and an ease of business as there is now only one inspector instead of 15 the traders had to deal with, the BJP president said.
He also referred to the surgical strike by the Indian forces inside Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) to take revenge of the Pathankot attack that brought a global realisation that “after Israel and America, India is the only country which protects its soldiers.” He also referred to the government resolving the “one rank, one pension” issue hanging on for the past 40 years.
