Modi failed to keep acche din promises: Sonia Gandhi

A combative Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Wednesday took the BJP-led NDA government head-on ahead of its first anniversary later this month — inside and outside the House.

At the Congress Parliamentary Party meeting, she attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi frontally on failing to deliver on his “acche din” promises; and then followed it up in the Lok Sabha, challenging the ruling dispensation’s claims to transparent governance.

Ms. Gandhi’s scathing speech that took even her party colleagues at the CPP meeting by surprise on Wednesday came weeks after she had shown a similar display of aggression in the first half of the Budget Session: at that time, she had, for instance, led 14 political parties in a march to Rashtrapati Bhavan to oppose the government’s proposed amendments to the Land Acquisition Bill, and her speech in the Lok Sabha when she accused the government of not acting swiftly enough on creating infrastructure in Andhra Pradesh.

At the CPP meeting, Ms. Gandhi accused Mr. Modi of running a centralised government, where neither ministers nor bureaucrats had any independence, of promoting crony capitalism and of creating policies that had hurt millions of farmers, handloom weavers and artisans.

Hitting out at the Prime Minister for playing “domestic politics on foreign soil,” she expressed shock at his sinking “to a new low” on his recent trips to France and Canada and becoming “an embarrassment to the nation.”

http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/sonia-gandhi-hits-out-at-modi/article7176052.ece