Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) national secretary H. Raja has termed ‘childish’ Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s remarks that the Congress would block the Land Acquisition Bill and would not allow an inch of land to be acquired.
Talking to reporters here on Monday, the BJP leader said Mr. Gandhi’s remarks made at the recent rally in Tiruchi exposed the party’s double stand on the issue as the party had deputed its MPs to be part of the select committee to which the bill had been referred for further scrutiny. He said that Union Law Minister Sadananda Gowda had made it clear that the government would accept the recommendations of the select committee, which were likely to be tabled before Parliament on August 3 and it was “childish” on the part of Mr. Gandhi to make the remarks.
“When the issue is before the select committee and the Congress MPs were studying the bill, Mr. Gandhi’s remarks were totally unwarranted,” Mr. Raja said. This clearly showed that the Congress was enacting a drama and it was not honest while engaging itself in the select committee, he charged.
Expressing concern over the “decline in quality of education” in the State after the introduction of ‘Samacheer kalvi’, the BJP leader said that Tamil Nadu, which was one of the top States in the country in maintaining high standard of education, was nowhere in the picture after the introduction of ‘Samacheer kalvi’.
He said that only 451 of the more than 2,600 students from the State who had appeared for IIT entrance examinations cleared them. It was distressing to note that 418 of the successful candidates were from Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) stream and only 33 were from ‘Samacheer kalvi’ stream. He demanded a white paper on the performance of ‘Samacheer kalvi’ schools.
He also hit out at Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader M.K. Stalin for criticising Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan Singh for his statistics on suicides of farmers in the country.
