A day after Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman launched the National Monetisation Pipeline scheme, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi said the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government at the Centre “destroyed what the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) built and now, as a last resort, they are selling everything that we had helped create”.
Addressing the media, Rahul Gandhi said on August 24: “BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi say nothing happened in the last 70 years. But yesterday, the Finance Minister decided to sell the assets that had been built over the past 70 years.”
He added: “We are not against privatisation, but our privatisation plan had a logic. We did not privatise strategic industries and we consider Railways as strategic industry because it transports lakhs and crores of people and also employs lots of people.”
“We privatised chronically loss-making industries. We privatised the companies that had minimal market share. We did not privatise government enterprises with the potential of checking private sector monopoly in a particular sector,” the Congress leader said.
Criticising the BJP over its privatisation plans, Gandhi said: “What this country has built over the last 70 years, is being given away. There is an excuse they have come up with that ‘we are leasing these’... The government clearly mishandled the economy and does not know what to do.”
“They (Government) have basically destroyed what the UPA built and now, as a last resort, they are selling everything that we had helped create. To me, this is a huge tragedy.”
(With ANI inputs)
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