New Delhi: BJP President Amit Shah, during his first speech in the Rajya Sabha on Monday, hailed the work done by the Narendra Modi government at the Centre and also lashed out at the Congress for “55 years of misrule.”
“We must remember the situation of the country in 2013, before we came to power. There was policy paralysis and the Army was being held back from displaying their true valour. All that has changed in the last three and a half years. When Narendra Modi was chosen as the Leader of the House, then Narendrabhai said this would be a government of poor, farmers and the backward. This would be a government that would fulfil the dreams of Gandhi and Deen Dayal. In the last three and a half years, we have walked on the path of Antodaya,” Shah said.
He said that in just three years the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government has done things which will go down in history as a success story. “The first big achievement is opening of Jan Dhan accounts. For the first 55 years, the country had one-party, in fact, one-family rule. Despite that, 60% people did not have bank accounts. But our government has opened 31 crore bank accounts. When we started this scheme, there were 77% zero-balance accounts. Today, there are less than 20% zero-balance accounts.”
Shah likened PM Modi to former PM Lal Bahadur Shastri. “During the 1965 Pakistan war, Lal Bahadur Shastri had asked the country to fast for one day and the country listened. For the first time since then, the nation has listened to a PM. When Prime Minister Modi asked them, 1.3 crore people gave up gas subsidies and the government used it to bring out the Ujjwala Yojana. 3.3 crore people have already been given gas cylinders and we have changed our goal from 5 crore people to 8 crore,” he added.
The BJP chief also hit out at the country’s “political elite” and said “those who live in Lutyens’ Delhi won’t know the importance of a toilet. Our Swachh Bharat Mission has built toilets for the poor.”
Hitting back at detractors and those making fun of PM’s “pakodanomics”, he said, “Prime Minister Indira Gandhi nationalised banks, which was a good thing. She said it would open the doors of banks for the poor, but that did not end up happening. Now the Mudra loan scheme is helping the poor get capital. I saw a tweet by Chidambaram Ji. He said will the poor now have to sell pakodas? I want to say that working hard and selling pakodas is better than being unemployed. Today, that man is selling pakodas, his next generation will become big industrialists. After all, this is a nation where the son of a tea seller can become Prime Minister.”
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