Congress Vice President Rahul Gandhi is on a two-week long tour of the United States and he will be holding meetings with academics, researchers and intelligentsia and discuss issues like emerging technologies, including Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology and biotechnology.
Rahul on 12 Sep had addressed the gathering at the University of California, Berkeley talking about India @ 70 and listing down the failures of the Modi government.
While interacting with the students at the Princeton University on Tuesday Rahul Gandhi accepted that Congress during its rule had failed to create the number of jobs required and agreed that this was the major reason for the victory of BJP over them. He said that Prime Minister Narendra Modi won the elections in 2014 and the NDA came to power only in the hope that Modi will fulfill its promise of creating jobs.
However, after three years of rule at the Centre, the government is failing to stick to its promises and the anger against Modi can be seen amongst the people. He said that people had elected Modi hoping for the good days of the country to come, though now they are realising that Modi has failed to keep up his words and is diverting the attention of the people by bringing up experiments like demonetisation and GST, which also seem to fail.
The Congress Vice President said that people who had voted out the UPA in 2014 are now angry with the ruling BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) also and their anger will be seen during the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections.
During his address, he spoke about different issues that India is facing today and also expressed his concern over the growing centralisation of the political system in India. He said that he would take efforts for the transformation of the Lok Sabha and state legislatures to open up the law-making process.
When asked about how a new person is having a strong hold on the politics both in India and US, Rahul replied that Narendra Modi and also to some extent US President Donald Trump came to power on the issue of job creation.
“A large part of our populations simply do not have jobs and cannot see a future and so they are feeling the pain. And they have supported these type of leaders. The problem is that the record on jobs of these leaders, I do not know Trump so I won’t go there but certainly our Prime Minister is not good enough,” Rahul said
Rahul giving data to support his statement said that currently, the situation in India is that at least 30,000 youths are entering the market daily in search for jobs and out of them only 450 get the jobs.
He accepted that even the UPA government was not successful in creating adequate jobs and this as the reason people got angry and choose the NDA government over them in 2014. “So those same people who got angry with us because we could not deliver on those 30,000 jobs are now going to get angry with Modi. The central issue is resolving that problem,” he said.
He further continued that Congress knew what the problem is and now it is a challenge for him to solve the problem in a democratic environment. He said that neither UPA nor NDA has been able to solve the issue of unemployment in India. He further added that the main problem is nobody is accepting it as a problem in the first place. First, everybody needs to acknowledge that unemployment is a major problem in India and than unitedly steps should be taken to solve this problem in a democratic and systematic way.
The Congress leader said that the ruling government is not focusing on the unemployment problem, rather it is busy discussing on the GDP numbers. “Job numbers are nowhere they should be. That is the crux India has to figure out,” he said. Rahul suggested that the small business should be turned into big companies to open up more jobs.
He also attacked the Modi government over the centralisation of power that Modi is exercising. He alleged that in the present government too less people are controlling too much in the country. Giving an example he said that while the local government should take the decision over what happens to a village road, in the present scenario, it is the Chief Minister taking the decision.
The Congress Vice President expressed the need of transformation in Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha and said that “I will like to open up the lawmaking process.” Earlier in the previous week, Rahul Gandhi while addressing at the University of California had said that he is all set to be the Prime Ministerial face of the Congress for the upcoming Lok Sabha elections due in 2019.
He has also indicated that he might take up the position of being the President of Congress.