IN LAST SPEECH OF 16TH LS, PM MODI SEEKS NEW MAJORITY

NEW DELHI: Prime Minister Narendra Modi bade goodbye to the 16th Lok Sabha on Wednesday with a speech that mixed good humour with gentle swipes at his rivals, warmly praised the leader of the Opposition, and pitched for a clear majority in the general elections this spring.

Modi, a first-time parliamentarian, shared the credit for all the work done during his term in office with the Opposition. As many as 219 bills were placed in Lok Sabha, of which 203 were passed, including landmark laws against black money and corruption; the House scrapped more than 1,400 outdated laws, hacking through a “jungle” of legislation, Modi said.

In the past five years, he said, India had become the sixth-largest economy in the world and was well on its way to achieving $5 trillion in annual economic output.

“There is a lot of confidence in the country now. Major organisations around the world are talking about India,” Modi said.

“India has made a place for itself in the digital world. We have now become the centre for economic activity with our initiatives such as Make in India,” Modi said. The 68-year-old Prime Minister said the world was now sitting up and taking note of India and its achievements because it had a majority government.

“The world recognises a full majority government. India suffered globally for long due to fractured mandates, it is now taken seriously because of the majority government,” Modi said, as he seeks re-election against an Opposition seeking to build a rainbow coalition to oust the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) from power.

“It [majority government] had a big role to play in our foreign relations,” Modi said, adding that neither he nor external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj could claim credit for India’s enhanced images in the eyes of the world. He credited it to the electorate.

“I saw the plaque [at my seat in the Lok Sabha] which had only the names of three prime ministers... Experts with liberal ideologies who give sermons every day will definitely deliberate on this,” Modi said in an apparent dig at the Congress. A visual of the PM’s seat in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday showed three plaques with names of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri, all Congress leaders who have served as the prime minister. Under Modi, the BJP became the first party in 30 years to win a clear majority on its own in the 2014 general election; it won 282 seats in the 543-member lower house. The Congress under Rajiv Gandhi had been the last party, in the 1984 Lok Sabha polls, to win a commanding majority on its own. Modi said his was the first majority government that belonged to a non-Congress “gotra” (lineage).

The PM reminisced about his first term in the Lok Sabha, saying, for one, that he had learned the difference between embracing someone and piling on, an oblique reference to Congress president Rahul Gandhi giving him a hug in the House last year, then following it up with a wink at his colleagues.

“I am a first-time member of Parliament and learnt several new things. I got to know the difference between gale milna and gale parna [hugging and piling on]. I got to know about aankhon ki gustakhiyaan [mischief of the eyes],” Modi said.

Last year in July, Rahul Gandhi said in the Lok Sabha that the BJP may hate him, but he has no hard feelings for the PM. “I love you and respect you because I am the Congress,” Gandhi had said and then walked over to the Prime Minister and embraced him. In another reference to Gandhi, who was absent, the Prime Minister noted that there had been no “earthquake” in the last five years, as had been predicted by some people. This was another reference to Rahul Gandhi, who said last year that there would be an earthquake in Parliament if BJP members allowed him to speak about the Rafale deal controversy.

Referring to Congress leader in the Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge, Modi rued the fact that Kharge had a sore throat and couldn’t speak too much. The PM praised speaker Sumitra Mahajan and said eight of 17 sessions of the Lok Sabha had over 100% productivity. The overall productivity was recorded at over 85%. It was left to Samajwadi Party patriarch Mulayam Singh Yadav to pay a compliment -- an unexpected one -- to Modi. accurate and that the price of the basic aircraft, accounting for escalation, is almost the same.

The report doesn’t get into a debate on the absence of guarantees, and repeats the government’s position on them that a letter on comfort from France (which, among other things, states that it will oversee the utilisation of funds and also step in if Dassault loses an arbitration case to India but doesn’t honour the award).

The report said the fighter did not meet nine of the Air Staff Qualitative Standards and that the company was allowed to change its technology and price bid. It also said that a competing bid from the European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company was also non-compliant.

Defence analysts say the fact that offsets will be looked at by CAG in a separate report, and the saving Dassault hasn’t passed on, will provide some ammunition for the Opposition, although a government official who asked not to be named said the cost of the guarantee will not materially affect the difference in the value of the two deals.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi called the CAG report “a cover-up”. “It ignores the cost of the missing Bank Guarantee & glosses over the suspect costs for “India Specific Enhancements”. But even the CAG couldn’t hide that it may take upto 10 yrs. for the 36 RAFALE jets to be delivered!” he tweeted.

The CAG report, however, does support the NDA’s position that the old deal was all but dead. The auditor says this was clear by the end of 2012 when the then defence minister constituted a committee of senior officials of the MoD to review the whole process. The committee submitted its report in March, 2015 and recommended that the ongoing process of procurement should be cancelled.

It also mentions that the two issues regarding Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL), which was to make 108 of the 126 aircraft in the old deal, were the cost of manpower (2.7 times higher than the French cost which Dassault used in its bid) and the French company’s refusal to sign off on a performance guarantee for the planes assembled locally by the Indian state-owned company.

A month after the old deal was scrapped, in April 2015, India and France issued a joint statement on the new deal.

Interestingly, while the report acknowledges the logic of the team that recommended that scrapping of the old deal, citing Rafale’s ineligibility, it doesn’t explain how the aircraft made the cut for the new deal, analysts say.

The report said following the April 2015 Indo-French joint statement, the Defence Acquisition Council (DAC) decided in its meeting in August and September that year that the Indian Negotiating Team (INT) should try and get better terms related to “Price”, “Delivery” and “Maintenance”.

The objective of the performance audit taken up by CAG was to see whether these objectives set out for INT by the DAC were achieved. On price, CAG found the new deal marginally cheaper. On delivery, it found not much difference. In the 2007 deal, 18 aircraft were to be delivered by the 50th month of the signing of the contract. The next 18 were to be produced under licence by HAL and delivered by 49th and 72th months. In the 2016 offer, the first 18 aircraft were to delivered by between 36th and 53th months and remaining 18 by 67th month.