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Journalism of Courage
Responding to the Opposition’s allegation that economic growth had left out the poor, BJP members in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday said if the economy had not benefitted the public, the BJP would not have won the three recent Assembly elections.
As the Upper House started a discussion on the Indian economy, initiated by Trinamool Congress MP Derek O’Brien, the first speaker from the treasury benches, Sudhanshu Trivedi, hit back using data from the International Monetary Fund. He said the IMF had said India managed to keep extreme poverty below 1% in 2022 due to the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana.
“There was a time when India’s economy was made fun of. They used to say that it would never grow by more than 2%. This was termed the Hindu growth rate…This 7.8% growth rate is the growth rate of Hindutva,” Trivedi said.
In response to former Finance Minister P Chidambaram, who said the impact of the growth was not visible on the ground, BJP MP Sushil Kumar Modi refuted the assertion.
“I don’t know which ground he is talking about. There were elections in three states recently and if growth was not visible on the ground there, then how did we win,” he asked. Sushil Modi added that the Indian economy had grown by 7.6% in the second quarter of 2023-24, outperforming RBI’s forecast of 6.5%.
BJP MP G V L Narasimha Rao added that India had become the world’s fifth-largest economy, moving up from the 10th position in 2014, when the NDA came to power. He said India moved from the 12th to the 10th rank during the UPA government’s 10 years under PM Manmohan Singh.
“Governments of the Congress denomination in the early decades of Independence have used this term ‘Hindu rate of growth’ to deride Hindu religion. But during 10 years of your rule, what have you done to the Indian economy?” he asked the Congress.
Another BJP MP Rakesh Sinha said the Modi government’s policies had led to multi-dimensional poverty being reduced from 24% in 2014 to 14% in 2023.
While the discussion went on for four hours as planned, Chairman Jagdeep Dhankhar decided to continue it on Wednesday to give more MPs a chance to participate.
