Addressing the Congress Chintan Shivir in Udaipur, party’s interim president Sonia Gandhi on Friday hit out at the Narendra Modi government for targeting minorities, especially from a particular community, across the country. Citing several communal incidents over the past one month, Sonia also took a dig at Modi’s mantra of ‘maximum governance, minimum government’, and said that the government has used this slogan to spread hatred and fear in India.
“By now it has become abundantly and painfully clear what PM Modi and his colleagues really mean by their slogan ‘maximum governance, minimum government’. It means keeping the country in a permanent state of polarisation, compelling people to live in a constant state of fear and insecurity, viciously targeting and victimising and often brutalising minorities who are an integral part of our society,” the Congress president said.
“It means using our societies’ age old pluralities to divide us and subverting a carefully nurtured idea of unity and diversity. It means threatening and intimidating political opponents, maligning their reputation, jailing them on flimsy pretexts using investigative agencies” Gandhi further alleged.
The Congress chief also emphasized upon the importance of the ‘Chintan Shivir’, calling it a time to introspect on the party’s organisation and the several problems the country is facing as an outcome of the policies that are being implemented by the Modi government.
It is also an occasion to deliberate on the many tasks ahead of us. It is both ‘Chintan’ about national issues and meaningful ‘aatmachintan’ about our party organisation, said Sonia.
She urged party leaders to keep the organisation above personal ambitions, saying the party has given us a lot and it’s time to pay back. Noting that changes in organisation are the need of the hour, she said, “We need to change the way of our working”.