A combative Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday took the BJP-led NDA government head-on ahead of its first anniversary later this month — inside and outside the House.
At the Congress Parliamentary Party meeting, she attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi frontally on failing to deliver on his “acche din” promises; and then followed it up in the Lok Sabha, challenging the ruling dispensation’s claims to transparent governance.
Ms. Gandhi’s scathing speech that took even her party colleagues at the CPP meeting by surprise on Wednesday came weeks after she had shown a similar display of aggression in the first half of the Budget Session: at that time, she had, for instance, led 14 political parties in a march to Rashtrapati Bhavan to oppose the government’s proposed amendments to the Land Acquisition Bill, and her speech in the Lok Sabha when she accused the government of not acting swiftly enough on creating infrastructure in Andhra Pradesh.
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At the CPP meeting, Ms. Gandhi accused Mr. Modi of running a centralised government, where neither ministers nor bureaucrats had any independence, of promoting crony capitalism and of creating policies that had hurt millions of farmers, handloom weavers and artisans.
Hitting out at the Prime Minister for playing “domestic politics on foreign soil,” she expressed shock at his sinking “to a new low” on his recent trips to France and Canada and becoming “an embarrassment to the nation.”
The Prime Minister’s “talk of consensus,” she said was constantly being belied — recently, his government had imposed AFSPA in Arunachal Pradesh “without as much as informing the CM” and then tried to push through the Bangladesh Land Agreement, excluding Assam.
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She also accused the government of assaulting everything precious that India and the Congress stood for. “We have to fight back,” she urged her party colleagues, and expose the government on its other sins of commission and omission.
If Ms. Gandhi took the government on a range of issues in her address to the CPP, her brief intervention in the Lok Sabha was focussed almost exclusively on the government’s efforts to systematically subvert the Right to Information Act to keep itself above public scrutiny.
She based her charge on the numerous vacancies in the Central Information Commission (CIC) including that of the Chief Information Commissioner. She also brought up the delay in filling up the post of Central Vigilance Commissioner and enacting the Whistle Blowers Protection Bill, 2011.
After hearing her out without any interruption, the Government fielded Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office, Jitendra Singh, to counter her allegations: pointing out there have been several instances under UPA also when the CIC did not have all of 10 Information Commissioners.
As for the delay in filling up the post of Chief Information Commissioner -- which fell vacant in August -- the Government's argument was that instead of promoting the senior-most information commissioner to the highest office, ``it has been decided in good faith’’ that the post be advertised to make the appointment process more transparent.
As he sought to accuse the Congress of stalling the enactment of the Whistle Blowers Protection Bill when the UPA was in power, Ms. Gandhi fleetingly stepped into the Well before leading her party members out of the House in a walkout.
This is the second time in the Budget Session that Ms. Gandhi has spoken in the Lok Sabha after maintaining a studied silence through 10 years of UPA rule when she spoke all of seven times including obituary references, felicitations and her own oath-taking.