BJP hits back at Rahul Gandhi, says country has moved on from lost decade

The BJP Wednesday slammed Rahul Gandhi over his comments on the Centre's Make in India initiative and said the Congress leader may have finally admitted the failures of the UPA rule but India has already moved on from that "lost decade" under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's leadership.

The ruling party's reaction came after Gandhi, in a post on X, said Prime Minister Modi did not mention Make in India in his speech in the Lok Sabha and asserted that he must acknowledge that the initiative was a failure.

The Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha also said that no government in recent times -- the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) or the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) -- had been able to meet at scale the national challenge of providing jobs.

 

Hitting back, BJP IT department head Amit Malviya cited data to underline the progress made by the country in various sectors under the Modi government.

In a post on X, he said, "The numbers speak for themselves -- manufacturing is growing, jobs are being created, and India is becoming a global production powerhouse."  "Rahul Gandhi may have finally admitted the UPA's failures, but India has already moved on from that lost decade," he added.

"It is good that Rahul Gandhi has finally acknowledged a fact the entire nation already knew that even after a decade in power, the UPA utterly failed to create jobs or strengthen India's manufacturing base," the BJP leader said.

However, what Gandhi "conveniently" ignored is that his party did nothing to prepare India's economy for the future, he charged.

After stifling India's manufacturing potential for decades through license quota raj, the Congress-led UPA continued its legacy of policy paralysis, rampant cronyism, and complete neglect of industrial growth, Malviya alleged.

He said a "perfect example" of the Congress' "disastrous approach" to manufacturing is what happened in 2006 when Intel sought to establish a multi-billion-dollar chip plant in India. "The UPA government kept delaying the necessary policy decisions, forcing Intel to take its investment to China and Vietnam instead." 

  That single failure set India back by decades in semiconductor manufacturing, the BJP leader alleged.

"Now, under Prime Minister Modi's leadership, India is aggressively building its chip manufacturing ecosystem, ensuring such costly mistakes are never repeated," he added.

Referring to RBI KLEMS data, the BJP leader said it has shown that employment in the manufacturing sector grew at twice the pace in the last decade compared to the UPA era.

From 2014 to 2024, an additional 17.9 crore jobs were created as compared to just 2.9 crore jobs from 2004 to 2014, he added.

"Unlike the Congress' decades of mere sloganeering, the NDA government is actively investing in capacity building for critical technologies," Malviya said.

In addition to eliminating 1,550 outdated laws and 40,000 unnecessary compliances, the government has also introduced "bold reforms" such as the Production-Linked Incentive (PLI) Scheme "which is boosting 14 key sectors and cutting-edge technologies", he said.

"The Congress' approach was to lament problems. The Modi government solves them," Malviya added.