The Congress on Saturday said the mistreatment of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee at the 9th Governing Council meeting of the NITI Aayog was unacceptable.
The Opposition party’s scathing criticism of the government think tank came after Banerjee walked out of the NITI Aayog meeting, claiming she was unfairly stopped midway through her speech.
However, the government rejected Banerjee’s charge, saying the time allotted to her for speaking at the meeting was over.
The grand old party alleged the Niti Aayog has functioned as a drumbeater of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has been chairing the meeting since it was set up 10 years ago.
The meeting was boycotted by Congress party chief ministers over alleged discrimination against non-NDA-ruled states in the Union Budget.
Congress general secretary-in-charge communications Jairam Ramesh slammed the central government and said that the NITI Aayog has been an attached office of the PMO since it was established ten years ago and has functioned as a drumbeater for the non-biological PM. It has not advanced the cause of cooperative federalism in any manner, he added.
Hitting out at PM Modi, Ramesh alleged that the Aayog’s functioning has been blatantly partisan, and it is anything but professional and independent. It muzzles all divergent and dissenting viewpoints, which are the very essence of an open democracy, he charged.
“Its meetings are a farce to be reckoned with. Its treatment of the West Bengal CM today, although typical of the NITI Aayog, is unacceptable”, the Congress leader said.
In another tweet on X, he further hit out at PM Modi and said Prime Minister in his address to NITI Aayog has woken up to the realisation that India needs to make policies conducive to international investments, that is FDI. He added, “For ten long years, PM Modi has indeed encouraged FDI -Fear, Deceit and Intimidation. And now He pontificates.”
Before FDI, India needs to catalyse and trigger a fresh spurt of DI (Domestic Investment), which marked the former Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh’s decade, he asserted.
He suggested government boost Domestic Investment, and FDI will follow. Ramesh said the fact is that DI in India has been extremely sluggish since 2014 due to a combination of several factors including Erratic policymaking, evinced by the senseless demonetisation, the botched GST rollout, and the unplanned COVID-19 lockdown.
Rampant cronyism that has led to increasing oligopolisation and restricted the space for competition, he cited another reason. The ED/IT/CBI Raid Rajthat makes businessmen fearful of expanding investments, he added.