The Hindu : Andhra Pradesh News : Azad joins issue on `India Shining' campaign

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 24, 2004

Andhra Pradesh

Andhra Pradesh

Azad joins issue on `India Shining' campaign

By Our Special Correspondent

TIRUPATI, APRIL 23. The All India Congress Committee general secretary, Ghulam Nabi Azad, attacked the BJP and the NDA government it was heading and faulted it on `several counts.'

Mr. Azad, who was here for the AICC president, Sonia Gandhi's transit halt at the Tirupati airport en route Nellore for her road-show also joined issue with the BJP on its `India Shining' campaign and said that it was rather strange that at a time when the BJP leaders should hang their heads in shame for the several ills plaguing the country due to their `inept rule,' its leaders like the Deputy Prime Minister, L.K.Advani, were riding `raths' and going round the country trumpeting that India is shining, he said. Only the BJP leaders are shining and not the country, Mr Azad told a press conference.

Mr Azad singled out Mr Advani, vis-a-vis the India Shining slogan, and listed nearly a dozen negative factors to prove how `hollow' the claim was. He cited in this connection the rape of a foreign diplomat in broad daylight in Delhi forcing her to immediately leave the country, the alleged rape and murder of an Australian diplomat, and the Apex court's indictment of the Gujarat Government while transferring the trial of the Best Bakery case to Maharashtra. "The Supreme Court says that it has no faith in the Gujarat Government where Advani's own puppet is the Chief Minister running a stinking government," Mr Azad charged.

He trained his guns on the Prime Minister, A.B. Vajpayee, and said that the very fact that more than 20 women died in a stampede in Lucknow, the PM's constituency, for a sari clearly mirrors the abject poverty and the dismal rate of purchasing power of the voters in his constituency. Then where is the India shining, he asked and taunted that Vajpayee was perhaps shining. Needling the BJP leaders further, the AICC leader wondered whether they should make such a hullabaloo for merely `widening' the national highways here and there, while the Congress had many achievements to its credit as the builder of several multipurpose projects, steel factories, power stations, national highways, longest railway line in the world, green revolution, nationalisation of banks and so on.

Charging that the NDA sold away the PSUs at throwaway prices, he cited the case of BALCO, which, he alleged, was sold for a paltry Rs.500 crores against its original value of Rs.5,500 crores. He also cited in this context the CAG's indictment of the Government for the sale of the hotel at Mumbai airport. Azad lashed at the BJP/NDA for going to the polls for the sixth consecutive time since 1989 on `non-issues' like Ram Janmabhoomi and Bofors as though national security, the problem of farmers, women, youth, etc were no problems at all.

About 4,000 farmers had committed suicide in the country, which, the BJP claims, is shining, he said and called the NDA a `faceless' government.

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