Prime Minister Narendra Modi took the Congress by surprise on Friday with a blistering attack focusing on the party’s record in office and described it as an obstructionist in the opposition.
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Modi sought to portray the Congress as a party that was out of sync with the new reality of India—a country whose demography is overwhelmingly young, with 65% of the population being less than 25 years of age, and increasingly aspirational.
In a sarcastic vein, he assured the Congress that the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), which assures 100 days of manual work a year to at least one member of every village household, will never be disbanded. The scheme will be continued as a living example of the Congress’ mistakes, Modi said.
“People can doubt my understanding on some subjects but no one can doubt my political sense. My understanding tells me never to remove MGNREGA because it is an example of six decades of failure of the Congress party; it has to pay people to dig ditches,” Modi said.
Defending his government’s decision to amend the land acquisition act, he claimed that it would not hurt his government politically.
The Congress and other critics of the government have said that the amended version of the law would benefit industries by making it easier for them to acquire farm land, and put farmers at a disadvantage by diluting inbuilt safeguards.
