Rahul takes price rise dig at 'Arhar Modi'

Attacks govt for being insensitive to common man's woes, blames corruption, apathy in controlling middlemen for spiralling prices

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Attacking the NDA government for being insensitive to the issue of inflation and its impact on the common man, Rahul Gandhi took a dig at Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The Congress Vice-President minced no words in saying that 'Arhar Modi' -- an obvious distortion of the more laudatory 'Har Har Modi', and a play on the name of the popular lentil by that name-- was the new slogan doing the rounds across rural India.

He scoffed at Modi's 2014 Lok Sabha election promise that if ethe BJP came to power, his government would control prices, and mocked the NDA government's celebration of its having completed two years in office. He said one can bluff about initiatives like Make in India and Start-up India, but one can't lie about food prices.

Gandhi rattled off the list of prices at which pulses and vegetables were being sold in retail, and compared them with the prices prevalent during the UPA regime. He blamed corruption and the government's inability to stop leakage by middlemen for the chronic shortage of lentils.

Admonishing Modi for ignoring the interests of the poor, he added "You had urged the people at a rally in Uttar Pradesh not to make you the Prime Minister, and that you wanted to be the people's chowkidaar (watchman) instead," he said. "It has been left to the Congress to serve as chowkidaar."

He recalled the UPA government's farm loan waiver of Rs 70,000 crore at a time when oil prices were at a high of $110 a barrel. In 2016, oil prices were down to as little as $44 a barrel. He claimed that while the NDA itself had acknowledged that the country was saving as much as Rs 2,00,000 crore a year as a result, the government waived corporate loans worth Rs 52,000 crore. While Gandhi said he wasn't against the waiver per se, he nevertheless wanted to know how much of the Rs 2,00,000 crore saving was used for the benefit of farmers.

The Congress leader also accused the PM of trying to grab land owned by farmers by with a controversial proposal to acquire agricultural land for industry, The proposal was ultimately shelved.