‘Insult to Mahatma Gandhi’s ideals’: Cong demands withdrawal of VBGRAMG Bill

A member of the All India National Congress Committee’s working committee, Rajiv Shukla said the BJP government has scrapped the world’s largest employment guarantee scheme, MGNREGA, by passing a bill in the Lok Sabha in the name of “reform”.

“Since 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been a staunch opponent of MGNREGA. He had called it a “living symbol of Congress’s failure”. Over the past 11 years, the Modi government has systematically weakened and sabotaged MNREGA, from cutting the budget to withholding legally required funds from states, scrapping job cards and forcing out nearly seven crore workers by mandating Aadhaar-based payments. As a result of this deliberate pressure, MNREGA has been reduced to barely providing 50-55 days of work annually in the last five years,” he added.

Further, Shukla alleged Modi government’s “use of the National Herald case to target the Congress party” which, he said, ended in humiliation.

“The ED, which has become an extended arm of the Modi government, used a worthless complaint to arbitrarily pursue a highly politically motivated charge, which was quashed by the Court. The politically motivated case targeting Congress Parliamentary Party Chairperson Sonia Gandhi and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi was never related to the law, but was motivated by personal hatred,” he added.

Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee President Amit Chavda said instead of the Modi government’s policy of changing names, work should be done to actually end corruption.

Announcing the second phase of Jan Akrosh Yatra, Chavda said, “There is a lot of anger among the people, there is anger on many issues such as unemployment, corruption, poor law and order situation, atrocities on women, rape, no proper compensation to farmers. In the first phase of the Congress party’s Jan Aakrosh Yatra in North Gujarat, the people gave a huge response and presented their problems and the failure of the BJP government.”