At a huge rally in Panaji on Sunday, Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janta Party, the biggest opposition party at the Centre, slammed the Congress, which heads the ruling coalition, for being inefficient and playing to vote bank politics.
"The country has faced its worst days under [Manmohan Singh's] rule," said Modi, also Gujarat's chief minister for the third consecutive term.
The rally was the first of 100 similar ones to be held across the country in the run-up to the general election this year.
Modi has two major talking points for his campaign: economic development and vote bank politics. The Congress gave him the upper hand in both.
Veerappa Moily, the new minister for environment and forests, said on Sunday that his predecessor Jayanthi Natarajan had not cleared several big-ticket projects. A special cabinet committee on investments set up by prime minister Manmohan Singh to fast-track industrial growth cleared many of these last year.
Two days before that, the Congress home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde of the ruling United Progressive Alliance-II, said that chief ministers should review cases of minorities who have been accused of terror cases in jail.
Shinde issued an advisory on Friday asking chief ministers to institute review committees to assess whether young people of religious minorities arrested on terror charges were indeed guilty.
He said this was in keeping with the BJP’s own 2003 decision to set up review committees to look into excesses under the now-repealed Prevention of Terrorism Act.
Shinde first mentioned this issue in October, when he asked chief ministers to be careful while arresting minorities, but failed to cite data showing that minorities faced discrimination.
Modi at once picked up on this, saying, “Nobody should be punished for being of a particular religion, but this should apply to everyone. There should not be vote bank politics.”
The committees that Shinde envisages are to consist of two senior officers and one retired judge. They are to independently examine evidence and hear complaints of those accused of terrorism.
Quite apart from the fact that these committees will in effect serve as an alternative judicial body without any of its checks and balances, it might even be unconstitutional to single out minorities for review, claimed Arun Jaitley.
Shinde’s suggestion implies that only those in religious minorities who are arrested on trumped up charges will be exonerated by the review committee.
India’s prosecution statistics are dismal on cases related to terror. Not one of 524 trials completed in 2012 under this act resulted in conviction, according to a 2012 report by the National Crime Records Bureau.
More than 90 percent of the 5,299 cases filed under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act are still pending in courts.
However, state records do not provide the religious affiliation of jail inmates. Shinde himself has not released this data.
The BJP set up their POTA review committee after the arrest of DMK leader Vaiko for his alleged links with the LTTE and of UP politician Raghuraj Pratap Singh under the act, according to a report by Ujjwal Pratap Singh on the issue of anti-terror laws in India.
This is not the first time this government has courted controversy in the name of minority rights. The UPA-II cabinet cleared the Communal Violence Prevention Bill in December 2013.
The original draft of this bill put the onus of preventing communal riots on the majority community. The cabinet amended this after the opposition protested in parliament.
Modi also critiqued the Congress on corruption in development. He criticised former minister Jayanthi Natarajan by saying he had heard of a "Jayanthi tax" in Delhi.
According to Modi, her department had not cleared any projects until money had been paid.
Natarajan rubbished these claims. “There are major green violations in Gujarat. He was destroying the environment. I was opposed to his destruction of the environment,” she said.
Natarajan was minister of environment and forests from July 2011 to December 2013. She replaced Jairam Ramesh, who was criticised for his activist approach to environmental policies. Industry leaders hoped she would be more proactive about clearing projects.
This did not happen.
Natarajan sanctioned 289 projects in her two-and-a-half year tenure, while Ramesh passed 301 projects in 2009 itself, according to data from Green Clearance Watch, an initiative of the Centre for Science and Environment.
Veerappa Moily replaced Natarajan in late December 2013. He has cleared 65 projects in just two weeks. Many of these include big-ticket industrial projects such as a Posco steel plant and hydroelectric projects in the north east. The total value of all these projects is estimated to be Rs 1.5 lakh crore.
Many of the projects Natarajan delayed had already been cleared earlier.
Moily said on Sunday that bureaucrats delayed projects because of a “fear psychosis” after the 2009 report released by the Comptroller and Auditor General on coal block allocations. He also said the laws were unnecessarily complicated and difficult to understand.
Nobody can have a perfect decade-long run, and there are bound to be issues that any canny opposition can latch on to. However, with so many Congress blunders and missteps, Modi does not even have to try to find something that feeds in to his own vision for the country.
"The country has faced its worst days under [Manmohan Singh's] rule," said Modi, also Gujarat's chief minister for the third consecutive term.
The rally was the first of 100 similar ones to be held across the country in the run-up to the general election this year.
Modi has two major talking points for his campaign: economic development and vote bank politics. The Congress gave him the upper hand in both.
Veerappa Moily, the new minister for environment and forests, said on Sunday that his predecessor Jayanthi Natarajan had not cleared several big-ticket projects. A special cabinet committee on investments set up by prime minister Manmohan Singh to fast-track industrial growth cleared many of these last year.
Two days before that, the Congress home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde of the ruling United Progressive Alliance-II, said that chief ministers should review cases of minorities who have been accused of terror cases in jail.
Shinde issued an advisory on Friday asking chief ministers to institute review committees to assess whether young people of religious minorities arrested on terror charges were indeed guilty.
He said this was in keeping with the BJP’s own 2003 decision to set up review committees to look into excesses under the now-repealed Prevention of Terrorism Act.
Shinde first mentioned this issue in October, when he asked chief ministers to be careful while arresting minorities, but failed to cite data showing that minorities faced discrimination.
Modi at once picked up on this, saying, “Nobody should be punished for being of a particular religion, but this should apply to everyone. There should not be vote bank politics.”
The committees that Shinde envisages are to consist of two senior officers and one retired judge. They are to independently examine evidence and hear complaints of those accused of terrorism.
Quite apart from the fact that these committees will in effect serve as an alternative judicial body without any of its checks and balances, it might even be unconstitutional to single out minorities for review, claimed Arun Jaitley.
Shinde’s suggestion implies that only those in religious minorities who are arrested on trumped up charges will be exonerated by the review committee.
India’s prosecution statistics are dismal on cases related to terror. Not one of 524 trials completed in 2012 under this act resulted in conviction, according to a 2012 report by the National Crime Records Bureau.
More than 90 percent of the 5,299 cases filed under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act are still pending in courts.
However, state records do not provide the religious affiliation of jail inmates. Shinde himself has not released this data.
The BJP set up their POTA review committee after the arrest of DMK leader Vaiko for his alleged links with the LTTE and of UP politician Raghuraj Pratap Singh under the act, according to a report by Ujjwal Pratap Singh on the issue of anti-terror laws in India.
This is not the first time this government has courted controversy in the name of minority rights. The UPA-II cabinet cleared the Communal Violence Prevention Bill in December 2013.
The original draft of this bill put the onus of preventing communal riots on the majority community. The cabinet amended this after the opposition protested in parliament.
Modi also critiqued the Congress on corruption in development. He criticised former minister Jayanthi Natarajan by saying he had heard of a "Jayanthi tax" in Delhi.
According to Modi, her department had not cleared any projects until money had been paid.
Natarajan rubbished these claims. “There are major green violations in Gujarat. He was destroying the environment. I was opposed to his destruction of the environment,” she said.
Natarajan was minister of environment and forests from July 2011 to December 2013. She replaced Jairam Ramesh, who was criticised for his activist approach to environmental policies. Industry leaders hoped she would be more proactive about clearing projects.
This did not happen.
Natarajan sanctioned 289 projects in her two-and-a-half year tenure, while Ramesh passed 301 projects in 2009 itself, according to data from Green Clearance Watch, an initiative of the Centre for Science and Environment.
Veerappa Moily replaced Natarajan in late December 2013. He has cleared 65 projects in just two weeks. Many of these include big-ticket industrial projects such as a Posco steel plant and hydroelectric projects in the north east. The total value of all these projects is estimated to be Rs 1.5 lakh crore.
Many of the projects Natarajan delayed had already been cleared earlier.
Moily said on Sunday that bureaucrats delayed projects because of a “fear psychosis” after the 2009 report released by the Comptroller and Auditor General on coal block allocations. He also said the laws were unnecessarily complicated and difficult to understand.
Nobody can have a perfect decade-long run, and there are bound to be issues that any canny opposition can latch on to. However, with so many Congress blunders and missteps, Modi does not even have to try to find something that feeds in to his own vision for the country.
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