NEW DELHI: BJP on Sunday strongly defended the government’s ‘Viksit Bharat Sankalp Yatra‘, a campaign to take social welfare schemes to the people and rejected Congress‘s reservations with party president J P Nadda saying he was “baffled” by the opposition having issues with such an initiative.
Reacting to a letter of Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge to PM Narendra Modi in which he dubbed the campaign as gross misuse of the state machinery, Nadda said on X, “It baffles me to see the Congress party have an issue with public servants reaching the grassroots to ensure saturation of schemes. If this is not the basic tenet of governance, what is?”
Nadda said “it may be an alien concept for Congress, but public service delivery is the duty of a government”. “If the Modi government wants to ensure saturation of all schemes and ensure all beneficiaries are reached, nobody who has the interest of the poor in their mind can have a problem,” he added.
“But Congress only has an interest in keeping the poor in poverty and hence, their opposition to the saturation drive,” Nadda said. The BJP chief also made a veiled reference to an incident when Rajiv Gandhi was PM. “Regarding opposition to a ‘rath’, it is a fit use of public resources unlike using warships as personal yachts,” he said, in reference to media reports that Rajiv Gandhi and family had used INS Virat while holidaying in Lakshadweep in 1987.
BJP’s IT department head Amit Malviya said, “Who said bureaucrats in GoI are not meant to talk about the programmes and schemes implemented? Should they just sit in offices and not be on the ground to assess the impact? Bureaucrats are duty bound to serve the people, as the government deems fit.”