Founding fathers envisaged Ram Rajya, Modi government working for it: Amit Shah

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) President Amit Shah on Monday said the founding fathers of the nation had envisaged to establish a "Ram Rajya" and the Narendra Modi government is working to make it possible.

"One of the stated goals set by the Constituent Assembly for the newly established Republic of India was to have 'Kalyan Rajya'," Shah said at the release of the book "Narendra Modi: Creative Disruptor" penned by R. Balashankar.

"Some people translate 'Kalyan Rajya' as 'welfare state'. But if you go through the debates in the Constituent Assembly, you will find the word Kalyan Rajya has not been used in the sense of a welfare state. In fact, the word has been used as an alternative to 'Ram Rajya' in order to avoid this word at that time," Shah said.

Stating that a "yugantkari parivartan" (epoch-making change) has come ever since Modi became the Prime Minister, Shah said the Indian politics was suffering from festering wounds of "casteism, dynastic rule and appeasement".

"This is the first non-Congress government that has got full majority and has ended that era. The mandate has been given to not run the government but to change the nation. And we are doing that," he added.

Shah said the Modi government also ended several dilemmas that plagued the earlier governments, such as "if the government would work for farmers or industrialists, if it would work for the villages or the cities or it would work for the poor or the rich".

"Our government ended these dilemmas. It brought unprecedented reforms but it did not lose the sight of Kalyan Rajya," Shah said.

Taking a dig at the Congress governments, the BJP President said the Modi government stayed away from populist measures and took tough decisions in the interest of the country.

He also accused the Congress Prime Ministers of doing "injustice" to national security by "overstating" that India was a peace-loving country, for the sake of building "personal image" (that of a peacenik).

In an apparent jibe at former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Shah said: "You may be an economist. We respect that. But the country is being more efficiently run by a 'chaiwala' (tea vendor, an allusion to Modi)."

--IANS

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