Modi's rule not been good for India, he failed electorate, says Manmohan Singh
Former prime minister Manmohan Singh
In one of his sharpest
attacks yet on Narendra Modi, former prime minister Manmohan Singh said
his successor’s rule has not been good for India as he “failed” the
electorate and led a government that was “mostly silent” on incidents of
communal violence, mob lynching and cow vigilantism. Singh, while
speaking at the launch of Congress leader Shashi Tharoor’s new book,
alleged that under the present dispensation the environment in
universities and national institutions like the CBI was being vitiated
and dissent stifled.
His remarks came amid the current crisis in
the CBI, whose top two bosses were divested of their powers and sent on
leave by the government.
In a scathing criticism of Modi, Singh
said he was elected as the 14th prime minister of India on the back of
many lofty promises, but in the past four years, he and his government
“failed” their electorate and eroded the voters’ faith. He said Modi is a
“paradoxical prime minister” and Tharoor has demonstrated this through
his “superbly written and devastatingly accurate book”.
Tharoor’s
book is titled “The Paradoxical Prime Minister: Narendra Modi and His
India”. “He (Modi) has spoken of being a prime minister for all Indians
but the government he presides over has been mostly silent in the face
of widespread communal violence, mob lynching and cow vigilantism.
“At
the same time, academic freedoms are being sought to be curbed. The
environment in our universities and national institutions like the CBI
is being vitiated and dissent stifled,” Singh alleged. His criticism of
the government’s economic policies was even more severe as the former
prime minister said nothing concrete had been done to bring back the
“promised billions of dollars” allegedly held abroad as black money.
The
“hastily-implemented” demonetisation and GST have proved to be
“disastrous” for the economy, Singh said. Petrol and diesel prices are
at a “historic high” despite the fall in international crude oil prices
because the Modi government chose to levy excessive excise duties
instead of passing the benefits of low prices to the people of India, he
said, adding that Modi, instead, has thought it fit to “punish our
people”.
Singh also alleged that Modi presides over a “fearful
population, an economy that has been set back by foolhardy initiatives,
painful lack of jobs, the growing distress among India’s farming
communities, a devastating number of farmer suicides, insecure borders,
instability in Kashmir, and the palpable failure in implementation of
even laudable initiatives like Swachch Bharat, Skill Development, Make
in India and Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao”.
“This is what he presides
over, and not a secular, plural, free and equal society that was…
envisioned and built in its six and a half decades as a free nation,” he
added. Modi’s rule has “not been good” for India and it all arises from
the Modi paradox that Tharoor has shown in his book, he said.
“Much
of what the Modi government is all about has turned out to be little
more than a series of empty gestures…with very little substance having
been achieved on the ground,” he said.
