New Delhi, March 4 – The Narendra Modi government faced a huge embarrassment on Tuesday after the Rajya Sabha adopted an amendment to the motion on President Pranab Mukherjee’s address on the inaugural day of Parliament’s Budget session.
The amendment, moved by CPM leader Sitaram Yechury, that was adopted by the Upper House refers to the absence of any mention on corruption in Pranab Mukherjee’s customary address delivered last week. The BJP is in a minority in Rajya Sabha.
Yechury moved the amendment saying that the House regrets that no steps have been taken by the government to curb corruption and black money. Parliamentary Affairs Minister Venkaiah Naidu requested the Left leader to not go ahead with the amendment as this is not a convention.
However, Rajya Sabha chairperson Hamid Ansari allowed a division of votes on the proposal, meaning the amended words will now be inserted into the Presidential Address. “This is perhaps the first time that an amendment was adopted to the President’s address.
This shows that it is a big censure for the government and even a loss of face,” Congress MP Ashwani Kumar said. The opposition has attacked the Modi government for its failure in delivering on the promises regarding alleged hoarding of black money by Indians in Swiss banks.
The opposition has repeatedly invoked Modi’s famous Rs-15-lakh-in-every-bank-account promise made in the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections last year. Earlier, in his reply to the debate on President’s address,
Prime Minister Narendra Modi attacked the Congress, accusing it of repackaging the schemes of former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who led the first NDA government more than a decade ago. “The UPA accuses us of renaming schemes, they renamed NDA’s schemes,” Modi said in Rajya Sabha.
As he read a series of UPA schemes with alleged NDA antecedents, Modi even mentioned the Congress’s pet Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MNREGA), which he had mocked in a speech in Lok Sabha last week.
Modi had called MNREGA a monument to Congress’s failure, although Finance Minister Arun Jaitley made the highest-ever allocation to the scheme in his Union Budget two days later.
-INDIA TODAY
