Asserting that the Congress will take corruption head on, Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Monday hailed as inspiring Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s assurance that he will take forward her five-point action plan to battle the menace.
“We will take corruption head on and demonstrate it through our actions and not through words alone. I had made specific suggestions in this regard [during her speech on Sunday] and the Prime Minister, in his inspiring address this morning, assured us that he will take them forward,” she said in her remarks winding up the two-day Congress Plenary here.
Ms. Gandhi said it was the duty of Congress workers to counter all the accusations levelled by the Opposition, particularly the BJP, calling them as “blatantly baseless and completely unfounded”.
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She said, “It is absolutely essential that we confront our political opponents aggressively,” adding that the Congress-led UPA government has accomplished a “great deal” in the last six and a half years and “we have every reason to be proud of our record”.
The Congress president added: “This is a record that stands out distinctively when compared to what the NDA did during its time. Nothing can detract from our solid accomplishments. It is our duty to propagate them among the people”.
She asked the party activists to launch nationwide ’Jan Jagran Abhiyan’ to “expose the BJP for its double-speak on the issue of corruption. There should be at least one public meeting in every assembly constituency”.
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Observing that several Central flagship programmes had been co-opted by non-Congress governments ruling in different states under different names, Ms. Gandhi said these State governments were “taking credit from our programmes”, which had been promised in “our manifesto”.
Directing party workers to expose this, she asked PCC chiefs to appoint monitoring committees to get systematic feedback on their implementation and submit assessment reports every quarter to the AICC.