Joshi Focuses On Uf-Cong Contradictions

BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi yesterday ridiculed the United Front and the Congress for supporting each other, repeatedly focusing on the contradictions between them. He was opening the debate for the opposition on the Presidents address in the Lok Sabha.

Speaking immediately after Sharad Yadav, he poured scorn on the Janata Dal leaders claim that the government represented the interests of the poor.

Combining these two strands of argument, Joshi challenged Yadav to tell the Congress to get lost, that the UF did not want the support of a party, under whose rule as many people as there had been in the country at independence were today under the poverty line.

When a Congress member protested, Joshi said that party could tell the United Front to get lost. Turning to Congress chief whip Santosh Mohan Deb, Joshi asked it he would support a government which had not even mentioned the killings in Tripura in the Presidents address.

He repeatedly called the address hollow, directionless, colourless, tasteless and formless, and mocked the claim of being pro-poor hollow, given the atrocities against the scheduled castes and others in UP, Bihar and Karnataka.

The nation had just 200 kg of grain per person per year, he said, the precise amount the British had estimated in 1860 was necessary to avoid famine. The nation was already importing grain and would be forced by the WTO to import more by summer. Emphasising his pro-Swadeshi line, Joshi said the finance minister goes abroad and tells those who ruled for 200 years to come back for the huge market. Nirmal Chatterjee (CPIM) interjected that this only continued what the finance ministers 13-day predecessor (the BJPs Jaswant Singh) had done.

Joshi said corporates had become afraid after the recent takeover code, since just three large multinationals assets were as large as the nations GDP. There was no mention of restructuring agriculture or developing water resources in the Presidents address, he pointed out. Emphasising nationalism, Joshi asked how the government planned to defend the nation against Pakistani planes intrusions, a repeat of the arms drop at Purulia or the talk by one of its constituents of gifting Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Would it build a hydrogen bomb, as he wanted, he asked.