‘Article 370 abrogation to triple talaq, govt has been decisive’: President Murmu to Parliament

This stability and decisiveness, the President said, enabled the country to effectively deal with the Covid-19 pandemic. “Wherever in the world there is political instability, those countries are beset with severe crises today. But India is in a much better position than the rest of the world due to the decisions taken by my government in the national interest.”

Praising the electorate for voting a stable government to power for two consecutive terms, Murmu said, “My government always kept the country’s interest paramount, showed the will to completely change the policy strategy.”

The address on the first day of the Budget Session focussed on the BJP-led government’s achievements and welfare initiatives. “Today, India’s self-confidence is at its highest and the world is looking at her from a different perspective. India is providing solutions to the world,” Murmu said.

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”.

The President urged MPs to set goals that seem difficult and work to achieve them to ensure India leads the world even as she emphasised the need to “walk together step by step, understand each other’s minds”. She said, “In this Parliament, which is the heart of our democracy, it should be our endeavour to set goals that seem difficult and achieve them. We should try to accomplish today what is to be done tomorrow. What others are still thinking of doing, we Indians should accomplish before them.”

She said the Union government was committed to providing transparent and corruption-free governance with a focus on people who are poor and downtrodden, and women. She urged citizens to build a developed India — with strong connections to its past glory but without losing modern concepts — by the time the country celebrates the centenary of Independence.

“By 2047, we have to build a nation, which not only embraces its glorious past but also encompasses every golden aspect of modernity. We have to build a Bharat, which is self-reliant and also able to fulfil its humanitarian obligations. A Bharat which has no poverty and where the middle class is also prosperous. A Bharat whose youth and women power will be at the forefront to give direction to the society and the nation, and whose youth are well ahead of time. A Bharat whose diversity is even more vivid and whose unity becomes even more unshakeable,” Murmu told MPs.

According to the President, the “positive changes” brought by the Modi government in its nine years in power had given citizens confidence. She listed welfare programmes such as PM Garib Kalyan Yojana, Har Ghar Jal, Ayushman Bharat, and PM Kissan Samman Nidhi, and lauded the modern infrastructure coming up, the digital network the country had built, the efforts to get “rid of the scourge of mega scams and corruption in government schemes” and the “rapid development and the farsightedness of decisions” that had helped the country become the fifth-largest global economy, up from tenth.

Saying that corruption is the biggest enemy of democracy and social justice, Murmu said there had been a relentless fight against corruption in the last few years. “We have ensured that the honest will be honoured in the system. There is increasing social consciousness in the country that there should be no sympathy for the corrupt in the society.”

In her speech that lasted more than an hour, the President the government was committed to “removing every obstacle being faced by women” and “to the progress as well as the protection of nature”. She said, “All the welfare schemes launched by my government have at the centre of them a vision to make life easier for women, provide new opportunities for employment and self-employment to women and ensure women empowerment. For the upliftment of women, even when the old beliefs and old traditions had to be broken, the government has not backed down.”

Murmu said in her Republic Day speech that India succeeded as a democratic republic because various creeds and people speaking different languages did not divide it and instead lived in harmony. Reiterating the message, she said on Tuesday, while concluding her speech, “Let us enrich our democracy by living up to the dictum of Veda which says — samgacchadhvam samvadadhvaṃ sam vo manāmsi jānatām. That is, let us walk together step by step, understand each other’s minds and let there be a flow of unity in our resolutions. Let us fulfil the oath of the Constitution by walking on our Kartavya Path in this Mahayagna of nation-building.”