By IANS,
New Delhi : The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Thursday said the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government has failed on four major fronts: national security, food and economic security, allowing erosion of democratic institutions, and corruption and criminalisation in governance.
“The UPA government has bartered away national security for vote-bank security and minority appeasement,” BJP spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters on the principal opposition party’s report card on four years of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government.
He said 2,500 terrorists were killed during the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) rule, but the number had fallen to 1,200 during UPA rule – an indication of how slack this government was against terrorists.
“This is a terrorist friendly government that has endangered India’s national security as a matter of policy to achieve vote-bank security,” he said. Prasad mentioned Home Minister Shivraj Patil’s statement comparing parliament attack convict Afzal Guru’s mercy petition to that of Sarabjit Singh, the Indian given a death sentence in Pakistan for his alleged role in a bomb blast there.
Patil reportedly said Wednesday that if Guru’s mercy plea were to be turned down, India could not argue for clemency for Sarabjit.
Prasad said the UPA government and the Congress chief minister of Assam had failed to check the large scale illegal immigration from Bangladesh despite a Supreme Court order terming it “external aggression”. After the recent Jaipur serial blasts on May 13, Rajasthan Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje had blamed Bangladeshi immigrants for it.
Carrying on the tirade, Prasad accused the UPA of failing to provide food security as well.
“It (UPA) has imperiled the food and economic security of the common man and farmers,” he said.
He cited a Unicef report released last week that said 100 million people around the globe are at risk of becoming malnourished and a significant number of these would be Indians.
“More than 22,000 farmers have committed suicide because of farm distress,” he said.
In an oblique reference to Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s shadow over Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and government decision-making, Prasad said UPA rule had seen corrosion of the democratic institutions and devaluing of the office of prime minister.
“The UPA should clarify if Manmohan Singh will be its prime ministerial candidate in the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections,” he demanded.
The BJP also criticised the UPA for sanctifying corruption and criminalisation in governance. Prasad said one of the union ministers was named in a murder case while another was censured by a commission of inquiry for the 1984 anti-Sikh carnage.
He said the UPA government had also blatantly imposed President’s Rule in states like Goa and Nagaland. Prasad said the UPA had lost all the state assembly elections, except Assam, since it came to power in 2004.