Openness and transparency is Congress’ legacy

Transparency, decentralisation, openness, liberty are some of the terms directly associated with the Congress. In contrast to this, is the BJP’s philosophy which lies on communal discord, intolerance, centralisation of power.

During the rule of the Congress, it followed mechanisms to ensure that democratic values, transparency, and devolution of power were followed in their true spirits.

Enveloping everything and everybody, right from languages, women, children, communities, Congress has always upheld the idea of unity in diversity. The Congress party, throughout its history, has encouraged its leaders to function in Indian languages by forming provincial committees that operated in Hindi, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Oriya, and other languages of the people. The party brought in peasants and women, campaigned to abolish untouchability and promote Hindu-Muslim harmony, nurture various rungs-National, State, District, Block and Ward level committees-of political leadership, that deepened the social base of the Congress and made it more representative of the nation-in-the-making.

Whereas, under the current dispensation, we only get to hear news related to cow vigilantism, riots, community clashes, religious intolerance, mob violence.

Recently, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, in an interactive session at Princeton University, U.S.A. also pointed out the same. He said, “I would like to see much more transparency in processes. We have a committee system in India, but it’s closed. Nobody knows what happens inside a political system. I sit on a couple of committees. And it’s 20 people and nobody sees it. Bringing in other people, making these things accessible to people, to see actually what is going on in the lawmaking process, to make these lawmaking process transparent, that’s a very powerful thing. I don’t think there is an expertise problem in India. There’s an access to information problem in India.”

Today, India is witnessing a dictatorial rule under Narendra Modi, in whom all the powers are vested and everything happens according to his whims and fancies. The most outrageous examples of the same are the disaster of demonetisation, which has hammered the economy and people hard and the ill-thought-out implementation of GST, throwing lakhs of businessmen into utter disarray.

There is an urgent need to eject the ideology of the BJP Government, which ignores and suppresses the voice of the common man.

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