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Cutting across party lines, the Opposition Tuesday slammed President Droupadi Murmu’s first address to the joint sitting of Parliament. Pointing out it made no mention of the many challenges that India is facing and stressing that it was cleared by the Union Cabinet, they labelled her address an “election speech”.
While Congress president and Leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge, who could not attend Parliament after being stuck in Srinagar due to bad weather, said the President has merely said what the Government wanted her to say, his party colleague Manish Tewari said it was a “laundry list” of the alleged achievements of the government.
“The complete absence of any reference to the border situation with China, complete absence of any mention of unemployment, inflation and on the other challenges that India confronts…shows that it was not a serious exercise in order to inform the Parliament about the issues which the country faces,” Tewari told The Indian Express.
“Article 87 of the Constitution of India states the purpose of the President’s address explicitly. It is to inform Parliament of the causes of its summons. It therefore can not be a platform to articulate the alleged achievements of the government. Moreover, does the remit of Article 74 that the President is bound by the aid and advise of the Council of Ministers be extrapolated to circumscribe the freedom of speech and expression of the President in terms of Article 87 where he or she is obligated to read out a Cabinet approved speech and not speak freely to Parliament,” he added.
Kharge said that if the achievements of the Government listed by the President are true, then the people should not feel the pinch of inflation and unemployment.
Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor told newsagency ANI that the President’s address was an election speech that was trying to praise the government for everything it has done and skipping over the bits it hasn’t done so well.
In a series of tweets, Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) chief Mayawati said the claims made in the speech “are not enough to console people who suffer from poverty, inflation and unemployment”.
“The claims made by Honourable President Droupadi Murmu on behalf of the Centre during her address are much less for the consolation and peace of more than 100 crore people of the country who are suffering from inflation, poverty, and unemployment. The country will progress only when the people are happy,” Mayawati tweeted.
She added, “Along with this, due to the internal and economic policy of the government, there is an absence of that environment of peace, happiness, prosperity and development in the country which could remove immense poverty and unemployment and the life of the people here will be a little better.”
TMC MP Derek O Brien tweeted, “As is convention, President’s Address to both Houses of #Parliament is written by GoI (Government of India). Any line in speech about controlling prices, creating jobs, strengthening (fiscal) federalism, promoting communal harmony, passing Women‘s Reservation Bill? Oh & 2 miserly lines about the North East.”
The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) boycotted the speech in protest against what they alleged were the BJP-led government’s failures “on all fronts of governance”.
CPI(M) floor leader in Rajya Sabha Elamaram Kareem termed the President’s address disappointing. The President’s speech, he said, has become nothing more than a narrative of the corporate appeasement policies of the BJP government ruling the Centre. \
“In the nineteen-page speech, there is no mention of the word worker or labour. It does not mention anything about our agriculture sector of India. It endorses the fact that the union government does not stand with the downtrodden of the country. It is sad that the problems faced by the people or the challenges the country is facing today are not part of the President’s speech. It prides itself on having a stable government in the centre for two consecutive terms and turns a blind eye to unconstitutional interventions by governors destabilizing the state governments,” he said.
“Many of the projects mentioned in the speech to praise the interventions made by the government in the fields of infrastructural development, poverty alleviation and women empowerment are actually only announcements that were not useful to the common people in any way. How can a government, which follows the policy of selling off the public sector undertakings and the country’s wealth, lead the country to progress? The job opportunities of the educated youth are constantly being cut, the rights of the workers are being taken away one by one, and the deliberate attempts to destroy the religious harmony and unity of the country are not being mentioned,” he added.
CPI general secretary D Raja said the BJP has forgotten the basics of parliamentary democracy by boasting stability and forgetting all responsibility. “Parliament is being made redundant and the basic structure of the Constitution is under threat. Stable government is showing its authoritarian face, owning no responsibility,” he said.
He said that B R Ambedkar himself had said that the Constitution — in recommending the Parliamentary system of Executive — has preferred more responsibility to more stability. “The President used the word stable thrice to characterise the government but the word responsibility could not become part of her speech,” he said.
