After mounting a scathing attack on the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party, Congress MP Rahul Gandhi on Friday trained his guns on the BJP.
Mr Gandhi referred to the BJP slogan “India Shining” in the 2004 Lok Sabha
elections and said, “India has made progress but it is still not shining. India will shine the day there is not a single deprived person left in the country and when poverty is completely wiped out.”
The Congress leader said, “These big leaders sit in TV studios, travel in big cars and live in air-conditioned homes. For them India is shining only in these places but not in villages. These leaders never come to your homes, they never share you food and never drink the water that you drink so they do not know the ground realities. They see the world from helicopters”
Mr Gandhi said that when the Congress came to power at the Centre in 2004, the government launched NREGA primarily to check migration of labour from the rural areas to urban centres.
“Today, NREGA has changed lives across the country but not in Uttar Pradesh where the implementation of the scheme has been below average. The village heads and ministers may have benefited from NREGA but not the poor people,” he pointed out.
Mr Gandhi touched a raw nerve when he said that the state government had usurped farmers’ land from Gorakhpur to Noida and when the farmers demand proper compensation, they were greeted with bullets in Tappal and Bhatta-Parsaul.
“I met officers in Bhatta Parsaul and they told me that there were no farmers in the agitation but Naxalites. We are now bringing a Land Acquisition Bill but the Opposition parties (the BJP) may say one thing to you but behind the closed rooms in Delhi, they are opposing the bill,” he said in an obvious reference to the BJP.
“The voice of the farmers’ does not reach the government because your leaders never come to you to listen to your grievances. Woh pasine aur dhool se door rehte hain, isliye aapki awaaz nahin pahunchti,” he said.