Mahua Moitra Excoriates BJP In Parliament

Brut India

“The truth is you’ve betrayed the very citizens who voted for you.” Mahua Moitra did it again. She tore into India’s governing party. This time, over CAA, economic slowdown and rising unemployment.

Transcript

00:00And it is your middle-of-the-road voters who today cannot recognize the India that they

00:07are living in.

00:08They cannot recognize the images they see on their television screens and they cannot

00:13identify with the hate-filled, venomous invective that they see members of the ruling parties

00:19spew out publicly.

00:20You have got express instructions today or the express intent today to shout me down.

00:27I say this to you.

00:28Do so at your own peril because the people of India today are on the streets and their

00:32voices are beyond your powers to silence.

00:35As a member of the opposition, I have the unquestionable right to tell you that as a

00:41government, you lack humility.

00:44You secured approximately 37% of the 67% of votes cast out of a pool of 900 million voters.

00:52That's only about 230 million people.

00:56You got only 23 crores out of 1.3 billion citizens.

01:02So despite the fact that you might have had the largest majority in several decades, don't

01:07arrogate to yourself an extra constitutional authority over every citizen.

01:12Do not go beyond the tenets of democracy.

01:15Today I rise to speak of betrayal and this betrayal is not just to myself.

01:22I was not part of the 31% who voted for you in 2014.

01:28I was not part of the 37% that voted for you in 2019.

01:32This is not about people like me.

01:36I was skeptical about you, your ideology and your rhetoric right from the word go.

01:42In a sense, you owe me little.

01:43But the truth is you betrayed the very citizens who voted for you.

01:44You did not come to power on the vote of the Hindu right alone.

01:45You came to power because a very large section of ordinary people, the aspirational middle

01:58of the road voters, cast aside whatever reservations they might have had about your past and believed

02:04you when you said sabka saath, sabka vikas, which they took to mean development for a

02:10united India.

02:11They believed in your alternative narrative of merit, of transparency, of a world without

02:17nepotism and the entitlement of the Baba Log.

02:20It is to this section of people, these middle of the road voters, that you owe your historic

02:25mandate to.

02:26These were not the hard-core believers, the Sanghis as it were, but they still believed

02:31you and they still voted for you.

02:32But you have betrayed the young voter who was eagerly looking forward to his first job.

02:37You betrayed the small businessmen by your foolish decision of demonetization, killing

02:41his market, ruining business for no fathomable reason.

02:46You betrayed thousands of tribal people in Gujarat whose land you took to build a statue

02:51and to whom now you have given jobs as toilet cleaners.

02:54You have betrayed them by questioning the citizenship of the very citizens who voted

02:59you to power.

03:00And it is your middle of the road voters who today cannot recognize the India that they

03:06are living in.

03:07They cannot recognize the images they see on their television screens and they cannot

03:11identify with the hate-filled, venomous invective that they see members of the ruling parties

03:17spew out publicly.

03:20A week ago, a meeting of Holocaust survivors was convened in Poland to commemorate the

03:2675th liberation of the dreaded Auschwitz camps.

03:29Only 200 people are still surviving and the one resounding message, perhaps the last and

03:36only message in their lifetime, that they gave to the rest of the world was this, Auschwitz

03:40did not fall from the sky.

03:42Auschwitz happened because people were indifferent to the plight of others who professed a different

03:48faith from them.

03:49All Holocaust memorials today serve as one reminder, not that it happened, but that it

03:55could happen again.

03:56We need to remember that it happened because not only of those who pressed the switch of

04:01the gas chamber, but also of those who sat back and watched when their neighbors were

04:07first marked out systematically and then dragged from their homes.

04:11The NPR, the NRC and the CCAA are all tools in this Machiavellian design to first mark

04:18out, then disenfranchise and finally annihilate.

04:21This is your biggest betrayal of those who voted for you.

04:25Nobody wanted to be part of this us versus them debate.

04:30My friends who voted for you in 2014 are horrified at what is happening in their name under your

04:35watch.

04:36As every election comes and goes, your members demonize dissent, exhorting your supporters

04:42to shoot people who stand up to you.

04:45Today, you have let a person who was banned by the Election Commission for speaking for

04:5036 hours to come to the floor of the House and present the manifesto of the ruling party

04:55for the Delhi Assembly elections.

04:58You have the executive authority to do so, but your government, remember, depends on

05:02a higher authority, moral authority.

05:05You speak of Ram.

05:06You speak of Yudhishthir.

05:07You speak of Dharamputra.

05:09What of Dharma?

05:10Have you forgotten that?

05:12You bring powerful narratives where our dadis become your terrorists and our children become

05:17desh drohis.

05:18But today the citizen is finally standing up to these bullies and they echo Ram Prasad

05:24Bismi's words, these are not my words.

05:26You have betrayed your bandit.

05:28You have broken your promise to put the economy first and to put development first.

05:32My words will be incomplete if I don't highlight the abysmal state of the economy, of the arcane

05:39jugglery that this government practices, where the Finance Minister, the Minister of Finance

05:45and the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Finance and the

05:49Minister of Finance, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of Finance, the Minister of

05:54When the Finance Minister is fearful of putting out a real GDP target, the Finance Minister

06:00on the floor of the house says that nominal GDP target is 10%.

06:05In the month of December, the consumer price index was at 6.7%.

06:09Does that mean that real GDP today is 3.3%?

06:13That is what the government is saying.

06:15Remember, when there is no integrity in statistics, little else remains.

06:21Between 2011 and 2017-18, per capita consumption, according to the National Sample Survey, dropped

06:28in real terms.

06:29This is unprecedented in modern times.

06:31Unprecedented.

06:32Moreover, all of that drop, according to the same data, happened after 2014.

06:38This data was first made public.

06:40But then as the bad news started to go around, the government suppressed the 2017-18 NSS

06:45survey, complaining that it was unreliable.

06:48There was no credible explanation given, though this very data had been used to tom-tom poverty

06:52reduction in the past.

06:54There is perhaps even worse news.

06:56The GDP numbers are disputed, partly because of disagreements about the right measure of

07:01inflation.

07:02A bigger problem may be that the method by which we compute GDP of the informal sector

07:07is crude and backward-looking, so we overestimate GDP when the informal sector is shrinking.

07:14You have a tendency to rubbish every economic expert who doesn't agree with you.

07:18But your very own economic advisor, the chief economic advisor that you selected, has gone

07:24now on record to say that all the more reliable measures of macro-statistics, growth in export,

07:30import and credit, investment, vehicle sales, are mostly negative.

07:34More similar to a recession year like 1991 than the moderate growth year you say that

07:39we are having.

07:40Then there are unemployment numbers, high and growing, which the government denies.

07:43If we are really in a crisis, the government is doing this country a huge disservice by

07:48trying to suppress data and denying the correctness of the data that exists.

07:53You have betrayed the ideas of transparency and of better governance that you claimed

07:57you were wedded to.

07:59And your betrayal has gone much further than that.

08:02You have betrayed the history of this republic.

08:04You have denounced the very ideas on which we fought and gained our freedom.

08:10Which was through peaceful and non-violent defence.

08:12You have tried time and again, time and again to rewrite the past and create a grotesque

08:18singular version of India with a false history.

08:21But as Agha Shahid Ali says, my memory comes in the way of your history.

08:27Three things, a majoritarian government, a subservient media, an appliant judiciary.

08:33Anyone alone cannot destroy a nation as we know it.

08:36But a combination of all three can prove deadly.

08:40We are not traitors today because we point this out.

08:42We are guards.

08:44Guardians of our soil and our constitution.

08:47Where is the one who said no to India?

08:49Here it is.

08:51Here it is.

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