Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge with party leaders Rahul Gandhi and KC Venugopal
Credit: PTI Photo
As the BJP-led NDA regime marked 100 days in power, the Congress on Tuesday said one sees a "whole host of disasters, reversals and a directionless government", which has also "failed to act" on India's "mass unemployment crisis".
Congress General Secretary (Organisation) KC Venugopal claimed the people have "completely lost faith" in the regime and the current trajectory suggests that this NDA government will "only prolong the misery" of the common man.
"As we look back at the 100 days of the NDA government, we see a whole host of disasters, reversals and a directionless government that is completely failing the people of India...There is still no vision to solve the unemployment crisis, rural distress or skyrocketing price rise that the ordinary citizen is suffering from. All that the government can do is create fake PR and spread falsehood and hatred to divert attention," he said.
Since June 4, he said Manipur is still on fire with advanced weapons like rocket launchers and drones being used by militants, multiple examinations have been cancelled due to paper leaks, 38 railway accidents have taken place, a "disastrous" budget levied fresh taxes on the middle class and a lateral entry scheme that would be the first step towards destroying reservations and it showed "how disastrous" the Modi regime has already been.
In a statement, Congress General Secretary (Communications) Jairam Ramesh claimed that the first 100 days of Modi 3.0 marked a "unstable, crisis-ridden" government and there was a litany of U-turns and a series of scandals.
He said the government yet again "failed to act on India's mass unemployment crisis". "The crisis has been of the government's own making, caused by the decimation of job creating MSMEs through the Tughlakian demonetisation, a hastily rushed through GST, an unplanned COVID-19 lockdown and rising imports from China," he said.
"The final straw has been the non-biological PM's economic policy of favouring large conglomerates. India's unemployment rate today is the highest it has been in 45 years, with the unemployment rate for graduate youth at 42%," he said as he cited reports by International Labour Organisation and Citigroup.
He said the "misfortune" of India is that the Prime Minister and his government are "refusing to accept this reality" and are instead claiming a booming job market.
"The self-appointed divinity himself has chimed in with the claim that the economy created 80 million jobs, using RBI KLEMS data. Enough and more evidence has however emerged that this data is not conducive to measuring unemployment, since a large part of the claimed 'employment growth' is just recording unpaid household work done by women as 'employment'," he said.