‘Everything I tweet is my personal opinion’
NEW DELHI: Amid the apprehensions about ‘foodgrain crisis’, the Congress on Thursday demanded that a committee on minimum support price for crops should be constituted immediately as promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi last November.
The Opposition party has also asked the government to publish a white paper on the current crisis of foodgrains by clearly spelling out who has benefitted from the export of wheat. Congress leader Deepender Singh Hooda claimed that foodgrain stocks in India were at a 15-year low and per capita stocks at a 50-year low. This is why the government had reduced wheat allocations to 10 states, including BJPruled Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, he alleged. “We want to tell the government to immediately set up the MSP committee as promised to farmers by the prime minister to provide a legal guarantee to minimum support price. The government should also publish a white paper on the current crisis of foodgrains, clearly spelling out who has benefitted from the export of wheat,” he said, adding that the white paper should
NEW DELHI: “Everything I tweet is my personal opinion”, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor said on Thursday, a day after his Twitter post on Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra’s Goddess Kali remark on Goddess Kali was termed as “personal opinion” by his party.
Without making any reference, Tharoor tweeted, “Two points: 1. Everything I tweet is my personal opinion. I don’t have any other kind. 2. ‘Those who stand for nothing, fall for anything.’ - Alexander Hamilton.” Moitra on Tuesday had stirred a controversy with her remarks that she has every right as “an individual to imagine Goddess Kali as a meat-eating and alcohol-accepting goddess,” as every person has the right to worship god and goddess in his or her own way.
While BJP criticised Moitra also be on the procurement and public distribution system policy in the country. Hooda said that the Congress stands with farmers and will raise their demands in the upcoming session of Parliament starting July 18 besides extending moral support to the farmers ‘Vishwasghaat Seminars’ from July 18 to 31.
“The
BJP government’s
and her party Trinamool Congress distanced itself from the comment and condemned it, Tharoor said he was “taken aback by the attack on Moitra” and urged everyone to “lighten up and leave religion to individuals to practice privately.”
“I am no stranger to malicious manufactured controversy, but am still taken aback by the attack on @MahuaMoitra for saying what every Hindu knows, that our forms of worship vary widely across the country. What devotees offer as bhog says more about them than about the goddess.”
motto is to stand with some big industrialists and serve them while exploiting farmers and farm labourers,” he alleged.
National security, foodgrain security and income of farmers had been endangered due to the government’s policies, he said. Taking a dig at the BJPled Union government, Hooda alleged that it has put its promise of doubling farmers’ income
and setting up a committee on MSP in the same basket as its “unfulfilled” promise of providing two crore jobs and bringing black money from abroad.
“This may be viewed as either a ‘jumla’ (rhetoric) or betrayal with farmers,” Hooda said, adding that the Samyukta Kisan Morcha is holding “Vishwasghaat seminars” and party will lend full support to them.