Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Saturday said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi was running the NDA government “like an elaborate event management and public relations exercise”.
Addressing delegates at the 84th AICC Plenary Session in New Delhi, he said real issues faced by the youth, farmers, women, and minorities were being “camouflaged by massive advertisements and headline management”.
The Chief Minister said the Congress needed to consistently raise issues of “agrarian distress, youth unemployment, slow growth of economy, and misplaced priorities of the Central government like the bullet train”.
He said unlike Mr. Modi, “AICC president Rahul Gandhi does not just speak Mann Ki Baat, but listens to the voice of the farmer, the young, and the voice of the exploited.” The Congress had not made false promises such as crediting ₹15 lakh into people’s bank account, or creating two crore jobs every year.
Mr. Siddaramaiah hit out at the Hindutva politics, saying the Congress should stand up to the challenge and reject “pseudo-national concepts” that were being imposed on the nation by the Hindutva forces. “We need to re-orient the national narrative on real issues of development,” he said.
“The forces of Hindutva have actually borrowed their ideological sustenance from the fascist thinkers of Europe, particularly of Germany and Italy. Their concept of nationalism emerged in the 1920s,” the Chief Minister said.
