- Friday, April 26, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
FORMER Indian National Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday (24) blasted the Narendra Modi government over its National Monetisation Pipeline (NMP) plan, accusing it of selling all assets in the last 70 years to the prime minister’s “industrial friends”.
“The Narendra Modi-led government is in the process of selling India’s crown jewels built by previous governments with public money over 70 years,” Gandhi said while addressing a press conference along with senior Congress leader and former finance minister P Chidambaram in New Delhi.
He also said that the government’s privatisation plan aims at creating monopolies in key sectors and it will kill jobs.
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Gandhi’s strong criticism came a day after Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman unveiled the NMP worth Rs 6 lakh crore (£59 billion) which included unlocking value by involving private firms across infrastructure sectors – from passenger trains and railway stations to airports, roads and stadiums.
LIVE: Press Conference by Shri Rahul Gandhi #RahulAgainstSellingIndia https://t.co/dEVhAJ9PPZ
— Maharashtra Congress (@INCMaharashtra) August 24, 2021
The Congress, which has ruled India for 54 of its 74 years since independence, has slammed the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government’s NMP as “legalised loot and organised plunder”, alleging that invaluable public assets created over decades are being handed over to a chosen few. The grand-old party also said that the government is giving away assets worth crores made from the hard work of people to its billionaire “friends”.
Rahul Gandhi’s sister and Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra had earlier alleged that the government is giving the “jumla of Aatmanirbhar (rhetoric of self-reliance)” but has made the country dependent on its “billionaire friends”.
“While giving the ‘jumla’ of ‘Aatmanirbhar’, they have made the entire government dependent on ‘billionaire friends’. All the work for those billionaire friends and all the wealth also for them,” she said in a tweet in Hindi.
Former Union minister Shashi Tharoor, who is a parliamentarian from the southern Indian state of Kerala, also criticised the move tweeting, “At least now, BJP should acknowledge that national assets were created since independence by successive @incIndia govts so that today’s BJP goverment can sell them to overcome the financial mess created in last 7 years of their misgovernance!”
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) also attacked the Modi government over the NMP plan saying the plan to monetise assets across key sectors has “officially” announced the “sale of India”.
India’s women and child development minister Smriti Irani, who defeated Rahul Gandhi in his bastion Amethi constituency in the 2019 general elections, hit back at the Congress saying its allegations only exposed its “political hypocrisy” as it had monetised the Mumbai-Pune Expressway and airports.
