India may have become independent in 1947 but the country achieved economic independence only in 2014 after Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, and modern Indian history is divided between the “pre-Modi and post-Modi era”, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Tejasvi Surya said on Wednesday in the Lok Sabha during the debate on the Union Budget.
Attacking the Opposition for its “baseless and logic-less arguments” on growing unemployment under the Modi government’s watch, Mr. Surya said that “the dynast and the prince of the Congress party is confusing his political unemployment as the country’s unemployment”.
Countering Mr. Surya, the Nationalist Congress Party’s (NCP) Supriya Sule cited BJP members like Pritam Munde, Poonam Mahajan, Heena Gavit, Raksha Khadse, Sujay Vikhe Patil, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Piyush Goyal and Dharmendra Pradhan as heirs of political families.
“A common thing I have with them is that we were all born in political families. I am very proud of being born into a political family. I am very proud of being born to my parents,” Ms. Sule said.
Intervening in the debate, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman answered a query regarding the fiscal deficit and said that the targeted fiscal deficit of 6.9% is a responsible figure during a pandemic year.
Ms. Sitharaman, who sat through for most parts of the debate, is expected to reply to the debate on Thursday.
In a scathing attack on Opposition leaders, Mr. Surya said the country’s economy was deliberately kept under shackles so that dynasts from Kashmir to Kanyakumari could control resources. “The reason why dynastic politics preferred socialism and kept a closed economy is because they did not want challengers to come and challenge their throne,” Mr. Surya, who represents the Bangalore South constituency, said.
Ms. Sule, in a sharp rebuttal, pointed out that business houses such as Wipro, Infosys, Kirloskars, the Walchand Group, the Kalyani Group, the Poonawalla Group, among others, built their enterprises from scratch before the arrival of the Modi government.
The NCP leader also raised the issue of a BJP lawmaker in Karnataka allegedly saying that rapes had gone up because of the way women dress and requested the Finance Minister to condemn the statement.
Rejecting Mr. Modi’s charge of being a leader of the “tukde tukde” (break-up) gang, Congress member M. K. Raghavan said he was proud of the leadership provided by party resident Sonia Gandhi and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. “We are not from ‘tukde-tukde gang’. We belong to a great organisation called the Indian National Congress,” he said.
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) member D. K. Kathir Anand said the Centre had discriminated against southern States while making budgetary allocations.
BJP MP from Ladakh, Jamyang Tsering Namgyal, spoke on infrastructure development on the Indo-China border and claimed that “not an inch of area” had been ceded by India to China. “The Congress party always doubts our Army,” he said.
