No more Ghar Ghar Modi, its Arhar Modi now, says Rahul Gandhi

On the ninth day of the Monsoon session, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi raised the issue of rising food prices in the Lok Sabha. “It is about putting in place a policy to fight inflation”, the minister said.

Rahul Gandhi earlier in the day hit out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government’s policies and highlighted the severe impact of inflation on common man. Any form of bluster is not a substitute for statistics. “Even today the corruption scandals that emerge are those of the UPA and not [that of the] NDA…We have contained inflation despite two years of drought. I asked why is there such discrepancy between the price that the farmer gets and the price in the market”, he said.

The Left also played the same old record.

The minister said during the last two years of the United Progressive Alliance government, food inflation was moving over 11-12 per cent, while the wholesale price inflation ranged over 6-7 per cent. Jaiprakash Narayan Yadav (RJD) warned the Government about the “tsunami of price rise” and its consequences.

The Congress MP in his seventh major intervention in the House during his career, said, “during elections, Modiji had said “make me a chowkidar” (watchman)”. Now, there is a theft of dal under the very nose of the chowkidar. But the chowkidar has not uttered a word. “But you can not do this because you want to benefit a selected number of people, who are big traders”, he added. Congress party president Sonia Gandhi was seated next to him during his speech.

“Make as many empty promises as you want, but give this House a date by which prices will come down”, he said. “Bluster is no substitute for statistics”, Jaitley said, in response to Gandhi’s attack on the Narendra Modi government for failing to rein in prices of pulses and vegetables.

Reeling out figures, the Congress leader said urad and tur pulses, priced around Rs 70 a kg in February 2014, have now gone up to Rs 160 and Rs 180 a kg respectively this month. He alleged that the government had waived off Rs 52,000 crore owed by corporates and wondered what it had given farmers and housewives “from the Rs 2 lakh crore it had saved due to a slump in crude prices”.

Mounting a scathing attack on PM Modi over price rise, Gandhi asked, ” The PM had promised to bring down price rise, what has become of that promise”.

Gandhi said there was a difference of ₹130 between the minimum support price (MSP) and the market price of toor dal now.

“When the new produce arrives, prices go down”, he said, and asked if the Congress-led UPA was any better in checking spiked prices of essentials.

“Today in villages people are raising a slogan: Arhar Modi”, he said at the end of his speech in Lok Sabha today.

“You are talking about a government (UPA) which left behind double-digit inflation…

This is a matter of statistics and not sloganeering”, he said. “No one should have any objection to that”.