The Hindu : National : Pratibha: wise policies helped to overcome disruptive events

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Feb 13, 2009
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

National

National

Pratibha: wise policies helped to overcome disruptive events

Special Correspondent

Security strengthened, economy safe: President

— Photo: R.V. Moorthy

President Pratibha Patil, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee and Vice-President Hamid Ansari going to Parliament to attend the budget session on Thursday.

New Delhi: The Manmohan Singh government used the customary presidential address to the joint session of Parliament on Thursday to showcase its achievements, claiming “it has acted on nearly all the commitments made to the people through the National Common Minimum Programme.”

Addressing members of the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha in the Central Hall at the beginning of the “budget” session, President Pratibha Devisingh Patil observed that the government’s wise policies and leadership had helped the country overcome two “disruptive events” last year — the Mumbai terror attack and the global meltdown.

“The attack in Mumbai was deliberately planned to retard our economic progress.” While saluting the security forces and police personnel who thwarted the terrorists, the President claimed that “my government has strengthened the country’s internal security to protect people from such mindless acts of violence.” She listed the setting up of the National Investigation Agency and the tightening up of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and mentioned plans to modernise maritime and coastal security, yet assuring citizens that “all care would be taken to uphold legal procedures and prevent any misuse of such powers.”

Predictably, the President claimed success for her government on the economic front as well. The economic policies “have resulted in an unprecedented growth rate of over 8.9 per cent in the last four years, with the growth rate in the last three years exceeding nine per cent.”

As the President saw it, the Manmohan government’s prudent policies “ensured that even as India faces an economic slowdown along [with] the rest of the world, our fundamentals are much better.” Despite the world-wide recession, the Indian economy would “still register a relatively high growth rate.”

The President patted the government on the back for the breakthrough on the nuclear energy and supply front, marking the “beginning of the end of 34 years of nuclear isolation and the technology denial regime that India was being subjected to.”

On the sensitive issue of developments in Sri Lanka, the President appealed to both the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE to return to negotiating table. “This can be achieved if, simultaneously, the Government of Sri Lanka suspends its military operations and the LTTE declares its willingness to lay down arms and to begin talks with the government.”

This being the last presidential address of the Manmohan government, it read like the United Progressive Alliance election manifesto, with the claim that the government was “singularly focussed on enhancing the prosperity of our people through the sharing of opportunity.”

Cataloguing various big ticket projects like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the address detailed the promised “new deal to rural India,” including chapter and verse on various social sector initiatives.

The political theme was stated at the very beginning of the address: “We have been through an eventful year — a year that challenged our open society and our open economy. A year that tested by fire the principles that our country has always lived by — communal amity, tolerance, compassion, justice and peaceful co-existence.” The unstated theme is that the government has performed well enough to be voted back to power.

Full Text of President's address

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

National