LUCKNOW: At an elaborate event to mark completion of fourth year of
NDA government, Union home minister
Rajnath Singh on Tuesday took the opportunity to heap praises on former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee as one of the party’s architects to lay the foundation of economic progress story witnessed during the current NDA regime.
Vajpayee was a five-time MP from Lucknow between 1991 to 2004, while Rajnath was elected as MP here for the first time in 2014.
“There was a time when our GDP could not go beyond 2-3%. I don’t have any hesitation to admit and place on record that it was PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, a local man from Lucknow, who introduced the world to India’s economic and development potential. He made the effort to take the GDP to 8% and then bring India in top 10 countries on economic parameters. We then slumped. I am glad that today we are back and now among top seven countries,” Singh told reporters at Lok Bhawan in Lucknow.
Apart from Singh, UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath and
BJP state president Mahendra Nath Pandey attended the event.
Singh, however, was harsh on the
Congress and
Opposition parties, saying none of them ever bothered to amend the Benami Transactions Act, 1988 and had lost moral right to question the NDA on the recent bank frauds involving
Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi.
“Some of the Opposition leaders keep asking us questions on recent offences. But I want to ask them what did they do in last 28 years. It was we who established adjudicating authorities, tribunal to confiscate benami transactions and properties,” Singh said.
Saying that while India has more than 400 billion dollar reserves today and India has attracted more than 156 billion dollar foreign direct investment recently following NDA’s aggressive policy, he yet again underlined Vajpayee’s efforts on the “mobile revolution”.
“We made 27 kilometre of highways as compared to 12 kilometre of highways in Congress regime. And even this idea was largely the brainchild of Atalji,” he said.
“India is the most attractive destination for investment today. What has happened in manufacturing is visible to everyone. There were just two factories till four years ago. Now we have 120. But then again, Atalji was the founder and architect of the mobile revolution. And our Prime Minister
Narendra Modi, with his JAM (Jan dhan yojana, Aadhaar and Mobile) approach, has brought huge progress to India,” Singh said.
