Sonia Gandhi targets PM Modi, slams NDA government's 'dictatorial' tendencies

NEW DELHI: Congress president Sonia Gandhi on Tuesday told the CWC meeting to prepare the party for the two critical tasks post its serial poll defeats: Mobilising a political plank among farmers and tribals and poor over the land/coal ordinances to fight back the Modi regime and to reach back grassroots to re-build the Grand Old Party.

Accusing the Modi regime of dictatorial tendencies and targeting it for, “deliberate attempts to communally polarise” people and for its “anti-farmer and anti-poor”, the Congress president urged the CWC to monitor and co-ordinate agitations across the states against the Centre’s ordinance that amended the land acquisition law and its coal mines ordinance. The UP Congress has also announced such an agitation on Wednesday at Bhatta-Parsaul, where Rahul Gandhi had agitated some years ago for farmers who lost land.

The CWC has also decided to take up the issue of low minimum support price for grain and sugarcane. Attacking the govt for serial ordinances, Gandhi said, “the country’s democratic institutions are being undermined. The BJP-led government has already promulgated 10 ordinances in its seven-month tenure”.

The NDA regime is operating through a ‘perilous notion’ that ordinances constitute good governance, she added while wondering whether there was, “an ulterior motive behind this hurry (to bring ordinances)?” Blaming NDA for, “effectively destroying” the Land Acquisition Act, she said NDA “brought back, through the back door, the law passed by the British in 1894.” On re-connect with the masses, she told leaders to “propose means” to strengthen the party among the ordinary people. The CWC sought views on cutting the tenure of office-bears to three years from five years.