Yashwant launches group to highlight govt ‘shortcomings’
NEW DELHI: About half a dozen opposition leaders and a disgruntled BJP MP on Tuesday joined the launch of former finance minister Yashwant Sinha’s Rashtra Manch — a group that plans to campaign against the economic and foreign policies of the Narendra Modi government.
MPs Shatrughan Sinha (BJP), Dinesh Trivedi (TMC), Renuka Chowdhury (Congress), Majeed Memon (NCP), Sanjay Singh (AAP), party leaders Ashutosh (AAP), Pavan Varma (JD-U), Jayant Chaudhary (RLD), former Gujarat CM Suresh Mehta and former Union ministers Som Pal and Harmohan Dhawan were prominent among those present.
Shatrughan, Lok Sabha MP from Bihar, said he did not get forum in BJP to express his views but insisted his backing to the front was in “national interest” and not an anti-party activity. Sinha said the front will not become a political party and merely aims at highlighting critical national issues. “Everybody in the BJP is living in fear. We are not,” he said at the event.
A statement issued read, “Fear rules the roost and members of the ruling dispensation are its worst victims. We live in an age in which facts can be manufactured and statistics made to order. The miasma of untruth has become so pervasive that uttering truth sounds like blasphemy. Propaganda has replaced performance as yardstick of success.”
The statement stopped short of naming PM Narendra Modi but blamed “impromptu and impetuous policymaking” for rural distress and “farmers committing suicides in larger numbers than ever before”.