lok-sabha-elections

Updated: Mar 07, 2019 15:40 IST

Congress chief Rahul Gandhi on Thursday launched the party’s political campaign in Punjab with a rally in Moga where he criticised the prime minister on a variety of topics ranging from the Rafale deal to farm loan waivers.

Rahul invoked Guru Nanak in his opening remarks and said that the Sikh guru had given the world a way of life that relied on love and brotherhood.

He described the battle between the Congress and the BJP as “a fight of ideologies”.

“On the one hand there is Guru Nanak Devji’s ideology and on the other it is the RSS ideology of spreading hatred,” Gandhi told a public rally in Killi Chahal village on the outskirts of Moga town.

“People are being pitted against each other,” Rahul said.

Referring to the 2014 elections which led to Narendra Modi being sworn in as prime minister, he said that at that time, the BJP and Modi had made many promises, but none of them have been kept.

“The PM promised employment for 2 crore youths every year, but nothing has happened to that,” he said.

“You go anywhere in the country and ask the youth what they do. The answer you will get is ‘We do nothing’,” Rahul said.

Praising Punjab chief minister Amarinder Singh, Rahul said the Congress-led government in the state was working towards providing jobs to the youth of the state.

“Capt Amarinder Singh is reviving industries that had been shut down. The country’s largest food processing plant is being set up in Punjab and jobs are being generated,” he said.

Rahul went on to question the work done by the PM in the last five years. “What has Modi done in the last five years? He gave five airports to Adani a few days ago while there was an atmosphere of war in the country,” he said.

The Congress had waived off loans of farmers while Modi had written off loans of the country’s biggest industrialists, he said.

“We waived off farm loans in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh like we promised. We did this within 10 days of forming the government.”

He then returned to the topic of the Rafale deal on which he has been attacking the PM regularly.

“The PM is not giving the Punjab government the Rs 31,000 crore it has waived off as farm loan waivers, but the same PM has given Rs 30,000 crore to industrialist Anil Ambani in the Rafale deal,” Rahul said.

“Before the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, there used to be the slogan ‘achche din ayenge’, today that slogan has given way to a new one - ‘chowkidaar chor hai’,” he said.

He went on to refer to other issues such as demonetisation and the implementation of GST and claimed that these moves were brought in despite the opposition’s protests.

“Demonetisation destroyed the entire infrastructure of economy. It made crores of people jobless. The PM made people stand in queues outside banks. But did you see the likes of Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi standing in the queues outside banks? The big industrialists were not there. Instead, the ones who were there were the poor,” Rahul said, alleging that the PM had “helped the big industrialists convert their black money to white”.

“When I said that Punjab has a drug problem, I was ridiculed. The then Akali Dal government said that I was lying. The current Congress government has broken the back of drug trade in Punjab.

“The moment our government is formed in 2019, we will give guaranteed minimum income and the money will be transferred directly to bank accounts,” he said.