SONIA TEARS INTO MODI REGIME
NEW DELHI: The Congress will return to power in 2019 and “Achhe Din” will be to this government what “India Shining” was to the previous NDA government (1999-2004), UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi said on Friday, referring to the NDA’s surprise defeat in the 2004 parliamentary elections which paved the way for the UPA’s decade-long rule.
Speaking at the India Today Conclave in Mumbai, Gandhi launched a blistering attack on PM Narendra Modi and his government, alleging the country was being led by a “regressive vision” and wondered if India was really a “giant black hole” till the BJP came to power at the Centre in May 2014, as has been claimed by the party and its supporters.
“Achhe Din will soon be India Shining,” she said. India Shining was the NDA’s platform ahead of 2004; Achhe Din was the NDA’s ahead of 2014.
In response, a BJP spokesperson hit out at Gandhi, saying India “got defamed internationally for corruption” when the UPA was in power. “As the party president, Sonia Gandhi presided over the Congress’s decline to 44 seats and its decimation across states. And as an opposition leader, she is practising the politics of fear and deception. She has taken both the country and her own party down,” said Anil Baluni, the national head of the BJP’s media department. He added, “Democracy and institutions are safe. The Congress is in danger. She should worry about that.”
Gandhi claimed that freedom of the people was “under systematic and sustained assault” and the provocative statements from the ruling side were neither random nor accidental — the usual defence put forth for such statements — but “part of a dangerous” design.
Gandhi, 71, who demitted the Congress president’s office on December 16 last year after remaining at the helm for more than 19 years, described the current environment as one in which history is being rewritten and facts being falsified, fanning “prejudice and bigotry”.
“There is a rewriting of history, falsifying facts and fanning prejudice and bigotry,” she said.