‘BJP has restored people’s confidence in government’
LACKS MANDATE TO IMPLEMENT PRO-HINDU AGENDA, PARTY PRESIDENT SHAH SAYS
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party chief Amit Shah yesterday blasted the rival Congress party, describing the Narendra Modi government as a visible government.
“The biggest achievement is restoring confidence of the people in the government,” Shah said of the Modi government, which completed a year in office yesterday.
Shah took on the Congress party, which has been critical of the Modi government and has criticised it as anti-poor and anti-farmer.
“This is a visible government. The earlier government needed to be found … This government has restored the dignity of the Prime Minister’s Office. In the Congress [party] regime PM was no PM,” Shah said while addressing a press conference at the BJP’s central office.
The press conference was part of the BJP week-long celebration, under which 200 rallies and 500 meetings are planned in different parts of the country to spread out achievements of the year-old government.
Prime Minister Modi inaugurated the celebrations by addressing a mega rally in Mathura district of Uttar Pradesh on Monday.
Modi in his address had lambasted the Congress party by listing “removal of the remote control” as one of the achievements by his government. The BJP had all along accused the Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi of running the federal government by remote control.
Smarting under Congress party vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s constant onslaught, particularly over the Modi government’s contentious Land Acquisition Bill, the BJP has decided that besides listing the government’s achievements, it would simultaneously expose the Congress party by listing their failures during the 10-year rule that ended with an embarrassing drubbing last year.
Besides rallies, meetings and press conferences, the BJP has also planned tours of 350 specially designed mobile vans to all 643 districts of the country to showcase the government’s achievements and initiatives through audiovisual clips.
Shah navigated a tricky question about allegations that BJP after coming to power had put on the back burner some of its core issues and pro-Hindu agenda that helped it become a party of two MPs in 1984 to getting majority on its own last year.
“We have not got enough mandate to address the core issues. We need 370 seats according to the Constitution to address them,” Shah said in response to a question regarding no effort being made by the Modi government to work on abrogation of Article 370 that gives the state of Jammu and Kashmir status of a special state and construction of a grand Hindu temple in Ayodhya in place of the razed Babri mosque.
Shah was referring to the two-thirds majority required to amend the Constitution.