by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books, News, Politics
New Delhi : The Urdu version of the book “Exam Warriors”, penned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, will be launched at an event here on Saturday.
The programme is being organised by India Islamic Cultural Centre. Several cultural programmes will also be presented during the event.
The Urdu version of the book will be very helpful for a large section of Urdu language students.
In “Exam Warriors”, Prime Minister Modi has given 25 mantras to parents and students for dealing with stress during examinations.
He has advised the students to celebrate exams as festivals, face the exams with fervour and become a ‘warrior’ and not a ‘worrier’.
Modi has also talked about yoga exercises and the importance of quality sleep for students to beat stress.
The Urdu version of the book will be launched in the presence of Union Human Resource Development Minister Prakash Javadekar, Union Minority Affairs Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, Petroleum Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, actor Rishi Kapoor, filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, actor Annu Kapoor, and India Islamic Cultural Centre President Sirajuddin Qureshi.
Written in a fun and interactive style, with illustrations, activities and yoga exercises, the Hindi and English versions of the book have been well received by students and parents alike.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Banking, Corporate, Corporate finance, Corporate Governance, Economy, Finance, News, Politics
New Delhi : The BJP on Wednesday attacked the Congress-led UPA government for blindly giving loans and weakening the banks due to which their losses increased from Rs 18,000 crore to Rs 53,000 crore, and said the NDA government brought transparency and forced people to repay their loans.
“Swachh Bharat Mission of Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not restricted only to the cleanliness of courtyards but is also about the cleanliness in our economic system,” Union Minister Piyush Goyal told a press conference here.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader said that after assuming the office in 2014, the Modi government inherited an extremely fragile banking sector.
“But the Prime Minister and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley took a wise decision not to bring any such white paper and they responsibly ran the government and brought sustainable solution to only strengthen the economy,” Goyal said.
Slamming the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government for giving loans without doing the fact-check of projects, Goyal said: “The UPA government started distributing loans from 2006 and the procedure went on till 2014. The bank losses increased from Rs 18,000 crore to Rs 53,000 crore in those years.”
“Due to blindly giving of loans overcapacity was created,” he said.
Citing example of the Indian Bank, Goyal said: “Same situation of the non-performing assets (NPAs) was prevalent when Atal Bihari Vajpayeeji’s government had come to power. And at that time, he brought the transparency and the Indian Bank is running in profit.”
“And today, we have also brought transparency in the NPA loans and tried to resolve the entire mess that Congress gave us,” he said.
Attacking the Congress-led government, Goyal said: “UPA blindly gave out loans and weakened the banks, but the Modi government ushered in transparency and forced all the responsible individuals to repay the loans.”
“In case they couldn’t repay the loans, we tried to resolve through Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code,” he said.
The Railway and Coal Minister also said that during the UPA government, a lot of big people took loans without taking into account the responsibility that comes along with it.
“But it is Modi government which has acted tough with these people and forced them to pay back,” he said.
Goyal further said that the strictness of the government also led to the implementation of the Fugitive Law, under which the properties of the defaulters are attached.
This is the first government which has taken strict action against the rich people to repay loan, he underlined.
Citing the achievements of his government, Goyal said: “Our government implemented the Benami Act. We brought GST instead of 40 different taxes,” the BJP leader added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Opinions, Politics
By Naresh Kaushik,
Taking a leaf out of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s book, Congress President Rahul Gandhi used his Europe tour to reach out to non-resident Indians, or NRIs — a group largely known to support Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in recent years. Throughout the tour, he targeted Modi for his style and policies, bitterly attacked the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and tried to project him and the Congress party as a better alternative.
Gandhi comes from a family where access is carefully controlled and only a select few are allowed to reach its members. But in London, he gave the impression that he’s accessible to the common man. He even mingled with the guests at his gatherings and shook their hands.
Speaking to journalists on Saturday (August 25), he mocked Modi for not talking to them openly. He accused the Prime Minister of not having the courage to answer reporters’ questions. This was a reminder of Modi’s public event in London in April, where he was accused of taking pre-planned and selected questions from the audience and not addressing even a single press conference. But one has to remember that Modi was also accessible to the media before he became Prime Minister. The question is, will Gandhi attend such open events and answer unscripted questions if he ever becomes the Prime Minister of India?
But still, this was a new Rahul Gandhi in London — more mature, aggressive, confident and ready to challenge his rivals. His sustained attacks on Modi, the BJP and the RSS were deliberate and sounded like part of a well-planned theme. It’s clear that he wanted to provoke the ruling party in India in order to set an agenda for debate. By comparing the RSS with Muslim Brotherhood, he wanted to plant a doubt in the minds of the Hindu right-wing organisation’s new supporters in India. This was also an attempt to drive away some voters from the BJP.
By targeting Modi and raising the issue of the alleged threat to India’s institutions under his government, Gandhi was trying to become the darling of the intelligentsia that supported the BJP in 2014. By praising Sushma Swaraj, who he’s bitterly criticised in the past, and attacking Modi for isolating her, Gandhi sought to create a wedge in the cabinet and was trying to impress upon the audience that he favoured an inclusive government where individual ministers were as important as the Prime Minister.
But we all know that Modi’S style of functioning is very similar to Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother, Indira Gandhi. And it’s a fact that in present-day India, leaders of all political parties act like dictators and once in government they rarely allow individual ministers to have an independent voice.
In Europe, Rahul Gandhi cleverly avoided talking about his own ambitions of becoming Prime Minister. He didn’t want other opposition leaders to stop dreaming about that ambition and thus jeopardise their support for an anti-BJP front during next year’s elections. It also went with his theme of projecting himself as a consensus politician.
He fumbled at the press meet earlier when he seemed to agree with Pakistan’s position that the main problem currently between the two countries was that India didn’t want to talk. But later, in answer to a direct question about Imran Khan’s election, he made it clear that relations with Pakistan couldn’t improve as long as institutions like the ISI continued to export violence to India.
The Congress president rightly focussed on the unemployment issue and was honest in saying that most countries are facing that problem and don’t know how to tackle it. He wanted India to follow China where he said small and medium industries had resulted in large-scale industrialisation and massive job creation. But he should know that a democratic India can’t be compared to a totalitarian China. In India, no government can take a decision without attracting scrutiny by the opposition and the media.
But where Rahul Gandhi didn’t come out really clever and mature is when he said that the Congress party was not responsible for the massacre of Sikhs after the assassination of his grandmother in 1984. For the second day in London, he failed to correct himself that members of his party were not only responsible but some of them led mobs to kill Sikhs. Although later his party didn’t give them tickets for parliament and state assemblies, they were never expelled.
Gandhi’s explanation that he condemned all violence and wanted the guilty to be punished, is similar to Modi and BJP leaders saying that they condemned all violence, including those by cow vigilantes, and wanted the perpetrators to be brought to justice. All of a sudden, just months before the general election, Gandhi, has given the BJP and the Akali Dal a major political issue. As Sikhs are in large numbers among the NRIs, he has only managed to provoke their anger against the Congress party.
Gandhi still has a long way to go. He still appears to lack new ideas and the political acumen required to take on Modi. But his Europe tour suggests Modi and the BJP will have to take him seriously. The man they dismissed as “Pappu” for a long time appears to have emerged as a tough challenger.
(Naresh Kaushik is a senior journalist based in London. He can be contacted at uknaresh@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Hamburg (Germany) : Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday made a strong attack on the Narendra Modi government by referring to incidents of lynching and attacks on Dalits, saying people in India were angry and the ruling alliance was weakening support structures meant for the weaker sections.
Speaking at the Bucerius Summer School here in Germany, Gandhi also attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi over attacks on women, “lack of jobs,” demonetisation and “flawed” implementation of the Goods and Services Tax and said corporates were being favoured over the rights of the marginalised communities.
Gandhi, who later took questions from the audience, also referred to his hugging the prime minister during the debate in parliament on the no-confidence motion, saying certain “hateful remarks” made against him by Modi prompted him to do so but “he (Modi) didn’t like and was upset by it”.
Gandhi is in Germany as part of reach out to the NRI community ahead of next year’s Lok Sabha elections. He will also go to the United Kingdom.
The Congress leader accused Modi government of not being keen on benefiting all sections from transformation taking place due to urbanisation.
“They do not feel that every single person in India should have access to fruits of transformation. They feel that tribal communities, poor farmers, Dalit, should not get the same benefits as the elite of the country gets. We feel everybody took the risk, everybody should get the reward,” Gandhi said.
“The other thing they have done is they have started attacking the support structures that were designed to help certain groups of people,” he added.
Gandhi said welfare measures of UPA government such as the right to food and the right to guaranteed employment had been weakened and money going into these schemes “is going into the hands of very few people, the largest corporates in the country.”
Gandhi alleged that demonetisation carried out by Modi had taken away lakhs of jobs as it had destroyed cash flow of small and medium businesses.
“China produces 50,000 jobs every 24 hours, India only 450,” Gandhi said, adding that bad implementation of GST had let to closure of thousands of businesses.
“These things are what has made people in India angry. That is what you get to read in the newspaper. When you hear about lynchings in India, when you hear about attacks on Dalits in India, when you hear about attacks on minorities in India, that is the reason for it,” Gandhi said.
He said the transition that is shaping the world requires certain protection for people. “That protection is being taken away and India is reacting to that. It is very dangerous in 21st century to exclude people. If you do not give people a vision in the 21st century, somebody else will which is not going to be good. That is the real risk of excluding large number of people from our development processes,” he said.
Gandhi said hate is a dangerous thing in a connected world and it is a choice. “I can fight you, take you on. I can compete with you but hating you is something I have to actively chose to do.”
Gandhi said his main complaint with Modi is that India has jobs problem but he does not say it and asked how it will be fixed if it is not even acknowledged.
Gandhi said level of violence is increasing in India and “women were getting a huge share of it.” He called for a change in the attitude of Indian men at the way they treated women.
He said non-violence in India was a foundational philosophy of India’s nationhood and noted violence can only be fought by non-violence.
Referring to assassinations of his grandmother Indira Gandhi and his father Rajiv Gandhi, he said the only way to move forward after violence is forgiveness.
Answering a question on the US and China, Gandhi said India’s role will be to balance like that of Europe.
He said India’s actions will be guided by self-interest and noted that it is closer to the US than to China.
Referring to Modi coming to power in India and “certain style” of leaders coming to power in the US and some European countries, he said the reason was failure of jobs, particularly to non-white collar persons.
“We are outcompeted by Chinese. That is creating a lot of anger,” he said.
He also said India was not in a race with China but was wanted to develop according to its values.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
Ghulam Nabi Azad
New Delhi : In an apparent dig at the Narendra Modi government, senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad on Monday said there was “no distance, as it is today” between the government and the opposition in Vajpayee’s era.
Paying tributes to former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee at a prayer meeting here, Azad recalled how as the Union Parliamentary Affairs Minister in Narasimha Rao government, he would frequently meet Vajpayee – who was the Leader of Opposition then – and share food and drinks with him.
“As the Parliamentary Affairs Minister between 1991 and 1996, I used to meet Atalji very frequently as he was the Leader of Opposition then. Three-four meetings between a Parliamentary Affairs Minister and Leader of Opposition are quite common. Since we were a minority government, it was natural to be dependent on the opposition,” Azad said.
“We would often eat together, sometimes in my chamber and at other times in his chamber (during Parliament session). There were no distances, no aloofness, unlike these days between the government and the opposition,” Azad said.
He said that Vajpayee was dedicated to the welfare and progress of the nation and its people.
—IANS
